
Joyent Public Cloud EOL - rubin55
https://docs.joyent.com/joyent-public-cloud-eol
======
skrebbel
Can anyone explain Joyent to me? My understanding always was that they're some
special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. They sponsor
Node.js, they sponsor all kinds of ex-Sun Solaris-related stuff, employing
high profile people from both communities. What does supporting (and, at a
time in the past, basically running) Node.js get a hosting provider? What
about Joyent's products is related to Node at all?

But oh, they're cancelling the public cloud, which I assume was the hosting
service? Then what are they now? I went to their site but I totally didn't get
it, I'm obviously not the target audience.

So, what does Joyent really do, how to they make money, and how does it make
business sense for them to do all that illumos/zfs/node etc etc stuff? Are
they an AWS competitor? A Heroku competitor? An Oracle/ex-Sun competitor? I
really can't place them.

~~~
SwellJoe
Technically speaking, they were quite far ahead of the curve. While VMs were
all the rage, they were shipping container-based products (their Sun refugees
kept developing Solaris Zones and ZFS in this context). The technical
abilities of the Joyent folks were well beyond just about anybody else for a
_long_ time.

One could argue they were too early. For several years they had the technology
to beat Amazon, until Amazon's massive scale washed over the whole market. The
founders did well, so it's not like they "lost", but it's kinda sad to see a
technically visionary set of products reach a dead end (one could maybe even
view this as the final commercial death of what Sun built).

Also worth noting, their stack is open source in ways that nobody else is, I
think. Maybe Google is doing right with Kubernetes, but everybody else is
consuming OSS software to build proprietary clouds and giving basically
nothing back. Joyent were doing most of the work, and giving most of the tech
away.

~~~
pron
I don't know if it was the immediate cause of their lack of success, but they
had also brought with them from Sun the Sun attitude of doing stuff that their
engineers thought was cool (and it probably was) without paying attention to
how much people are willing to pay for it and whether their focus is correct
from a market perspective. For example, Bryan Cantrill, Joyent's CTO, liked
blaming Oracle's Larry Ellison for the demise of Solaris, on which Cantrill
had worked, but by the time Ellison acquired the failing Sun, Solaris, cool
technology and all, had been pretty much dead or dying for a while -- at the
hands of Linux, and not much helped by the Sun attitude. Cantrill was furious
and blamed Ellison of being monomaniacal about making money ("don't
anthropomorphize Larry Ellison," he said) but perhaps it was Cantrill who was
monomaniacal all along, not keeping his eyes on the market. Then again, luck
plays such an important role in these things that nice narratives rarely give
the whole picture.

~~~
kragen
Solaris's death at the hands of Linux can be attributed in part not just to
"the Sun attitude" but specifically to the attitude of Bryan Cantrill
personally. In response to Dave Miller explaining how Linux's networking was
technically superior (at that moment) due to more care for things like TLB
footprints and system call overhead, and also had more accessible technical
support, Cantrill famously decided to respond by _making fun of Miller for
being a nerd_ : "Have you ever kissed a girl?"

[https://www.osnews.com/story/28261/have-you-ever-kissed-a-
gi...](https://www.osnews.com/story/28261/have-you-ever-kissed-a-girl/)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20110721130404/https://cryptnet....](https://web.archive.org/web/20110721130404/https://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html)

Admittedly, this was in 1996, and it's possible Cantrill regretted this
remark, or the nerd-hating attitude behind it, at some point in the
intervening 23 years. But I've never seen him admit it. I see he's
participating in this thread, so if you see him not replying to this message,
that's him doubling down.

~~~
bcantrill
Ha ha -- wow! I had no idea that I possessed such power over time and space!
As has already been pointed out to you (and has been pointed out repeatedly on
HN over the years), I _do_ regret the remark. So, there's that.

I would also note that the rise of Linux in the late 1990s and early 2000s
corresponds with the performance of x86 surpassing the performance of the RISC
microprocessors during that same period -- a time when the only other open
source Unix was operating under a legal cloud from AT&T. It seems likely that
these forces played a greater role than a twentysomething engineer shooting
his mouth off on Usenet...

~~~
skrebbel
FWIW when I asked the "what's Joyent all about" question I never expected or
hoped this would become a "let's blame Bryan Cantrill for random shit"
flamefest. I'm not sure where all of that is coming from and I'm sorry if
somehow I triggered all that.

You've been a great example to me and many others, in doing open source, in
taking a principled stance (even if I subtly disagree with some of your
principles) and also in showing that yes, it's totally possible to found a
company with an incomprehensible business model, grow it, have it contribute
lots and lots to awesome open source, and somehow despite all the free work
and the incomprehensibilities, flip it for a profit. One day I hope to do the
same and all of HN will be like "huh?"

~~~
bcantrill
Hey, thanks for that! The HN comments here today have been full of surprises,
not least the intense personalization of it all! I believe that our impact in
the world is much more in the people we inspire than in those we rankle -- so
in that regard, it's deeply gratifying to know that I have been of service;
thank you!

~~~
pron
> full of surprises, not least the intense personalization of it all!

I'm surprised you're surprised by this, considering that you have contributed
much to the personalization of such matters. The personal "psychologization"
of complex social dynamics is pretty much the trademark of many of your talks.
If you find psychological explanations attractive, why are you surprised when
others do, too?

------
tjfontaine
I can say without a doubt, if it weren’t for Joyent, my fantastic coworkers,
and the experience and opportunity they granted me I wouldn’t be where I am
today. I fondly remember debugging issues and learning so much with my
talented coworkers. Congratulations Joyeurs on everything you’ve done to
forward the Public Cloud and Systems Engineering.

~~~
tosh
The people at and the community around textdrive & joyent was a key part for
me being able to learn a ton of stuff online about servers, writing software,
good design etc.

Random kind inspiring people on the interwebs (most of whom I never met in
person!). Incredible.

edit: also had one of their early "VC" deals for lifetime hosting. Very
interesting feeling to have something you don't have to pay for anymore on a
monthly basis, inspires to make the most of it. Got a ton of mileage out of it
and wasn't upset about it being sunset, by that time hosting was quite cheap
already.

edit2: When they started to adopt OpenSolaris I took a closer look and
eventually ended up with it as my main desktop system back then & learned
about ZFS and dtrace. Magical, fascinating times.

------
TimTheTinker
TextDrive (bought by Joyent) was one of the first hosting services to support
Ruby On Rails as a first-class service -- in the days when static hosting,
PHP, Perl, and Java/Tomcat were the only options on Linux infrastructure. They
were well-noted for their "lifetime hosting" membership deal, which was
incredibly exciting at the time (this was in a day where flat-fee and free
hosting outside the likes of MySpace and Geocities was unheard-of). TextDrive
was where all the cool kids hosted their projects.

RIP Joyent public cloud (and the last remnant of TextDrive's legacy).

~~~
tosh
Also I just remembered Strongspace (which was one of their products back
then), very compelling and well designed online storage (e.g. for backup) back
then. In a way this could have grown into Dropbox or Box when you think of it.

The Joyent email + calendar + notes web app was also quite impressive at the
time. So many memories.

~~~
davidpaulyoung
Good memories! [https://davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-
joy...](https://davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-joyent/)

~~~
jmarneweck
Hey David! Good memories. David glad to hear you've sorted your demons out! If
you are ever in Cape Town, drop by to say hi.

------
ericfrederich
Sad to hear. I selfishly hope the company does well for the sole purpose of
keeping Bryan Cantrill employed so he can continue to give fantastic talks
that I watch on YouTube.

------
joeblubaugh
Wow, 5 months is an insanely short timetable to ask people to migrate entire
systems to another vendor. I’m surprised their contracts don’t have better
terms.

~~~
Locator9
Joyent really doesn’t have a great track record on shutting down services...
That said my view on the company is very much tainted by what happened many
years ago when they where a different type of company all together. I
personally purchased a few of their ‘VC’ plans before they when all
enterprise.

~~~
dogecoinbase
If anyone's curious, some of that history was documented here:
[http://billturner.github.io/2014/02/28/whats-happened-to-
tex...](http://billturner.github.io/2014/02/28/whats-happened-to-textdrive/)

~~~
eli
I once had an idea to research and write something about the history of
Textdrive. Seems like there's something in there about how the internet
changed from the '00s to the '10s and it'd be neat to interview some of the
players and see where they are now.

------
rubin55
Here's a blog explaining the decision : [https://www.joyent.com/blog/joyent-
announces-strategic-chang...](https://www.joyent.com/blog/joyent-announces-
strategic-change-to-their-public-cloud-business)

~~~
Annatar
That doesn't explain anything really. What I want to know is what actually
went on behind closed doors. Everything else is corporate public relations. In
these cases hearsay is often far more accurate and reliable than these
carefully worded statements.

The statement implies that Samsung's hunger for resources had grown so large
that there is no more room for the public hosting side of the business, but
considering how high performance SmartOS zones are (bare metal performance), I
find that incredulous. How is that even possible?

But do let us, for the purpose of this mental exercise, presume that Samsung
has indeed such great hunger for resources that public side of the business
has to go: surely a chaebol as large and as financially powerful as Samsung
has the funding to keep both its internal infrastructure hunger and the public
side of the business sated, and easily at that?

Another option could be that the public side of the business was losing money,
but considering just how trivially easy and fast SmartOS zones are to
provision, and how little financial resources it costs to run them (it costs
me literally peanuts and I run my entire datacenter at my own premise and
expense), it is hard for me to fathom what could have possibly went wrong
there: this technology is so advanced and ahead of its time that even a single
customer running on it would be profitable, a bonus, and Joyent has more than
one customer...

~~~
60sec
Perhaps this has more to do with goals and focus than cost/efficiency. In many
tech companies the scarcest resource is man-hours for development/maintenance.

The order of complexity for public cloud/multi-tenant is much higher than for
private/single-tenant, especially given the recent onslaught of CPU
vulnerabilities.

Still a big loss. I imagine it must feel like a defeat, especially to Bryan,
given the corporate culture at Joyent. Open sourcing triton is great, but it
still needs hosting for people to use it. Amazon/Google/Microsoft could
certainly cut costs if they leveraged bare metal so who knows.

~~~
bcantrill
I don't know that I had personalized it quite that deeply, but it's certainly
an end of an era for us and for our public cloud customers. The technology is
alive and well, and being used more broadly than ever for on-premises
infrastructure. In that regard, the costs of the public cloud are less in the
technology, and more in the surround of support, billing, etc. Certainly, the
(significant) work that we had to do for CPU vulnerability mitigation needed
to be done for our on-prem customers as well...

~~~
protomyth
Will this affect Triton SmartOS?

------
jpgvm
End of an era. Lots of good stuff to come out of Joyent and I hope we don't
see the end of their OSS contributions. Manatee (the state machine behind
Manta PostgreSQL HA), the SmartOS KVM port, Triton itself - huge body of great
stuff in addition to Illumos contributions that they are perhaps better known
for.

~~~
hjhart
Manta was one of the most exciting technologies I touched five years ago.
Color me impressed when I inline `sed` replaced 3TB of logs (2.5 years worth)
in 30 seconds on our manta storage.

~~~
jmarneweck
Used it for the backing store for the npm's registry when tarballs were moved
out of CouchDB. Managed to cope with us flushing the CDN cache (Fastly) and
not fall over with users downloading packages.

------
berns
> For our existing public cloud and private data center customers, adding
> scale, financial muscle, and Samsung as both a partner for innovation and as
> a large anchor tenant customer for Triton and Manta, will pay big dividends.

The tenant is now too large, please move out.

~~~
velcrovan
Fun fact, in 2008 Joyent was Twitter’s host and asked them to leave.

~~~
TimTheTinker
Interesting. TextDrive (which turned into Joyent) was one of the first Ruby on
Rails hosting options, and Twitter was first built as a RoR app.

~~~
unexpected
another fun fact: a lot of the early HackerNews posts were the daily drama of
Twitter's RoR struggles.

~~~
abrowne
I kind of miss seeing the Fail Whale.

~~~
fernandotakai
same!

i also miss their xmpp bot for some weird reason.

------
jiveturkey
Oh no! I was just researching them and about to buy services! I suppose that's
the problem. Too many "about to buy" and not enough actual buying.

But I mean, in honesty it's long overdue. Technical superiority loses out
again.

------
saurik
One nice thing about having more cloud providers is having more options for
where your computation was housed. I have had a machine at Joyent for a long
time now (with the goal of building a service that I never got around to, so
sadly for them only ever the one computer) because their US South West
datacenter is located not just "in Vegas" but specifically at the SwitchNAP
SuperNAP site, which co-located me with other resources I was using: I had a
<1ms ping to my upstream telecom provider, and thereby could sit inside of
real-time audio without adding noticeable latency (as well as have the option
of getting extra-cheap bandwidth: I wasn't going to be costing Joyent anything
for bandwidth but was still intending to use lots of CPU, so they had
indicated a willingness to let me one-off this billing if I ever actually
scaled up, though I was still quite happy to pay the full price for the epic
latency). AWS is great (and I honestly used them for most of my less latency
sensitive projects... hence the problem for Joyent, I appreciate), but their
lack of a South West location means that the lowest ping I can get from them
for this purpose is almost 20ms :(.

------
equalunique
I have been a fan of Joyent's tech for several years now. This change seems
like a scary one. Wishing them luck.

------
warp_factor
Sad day. I never used them but I always enjoyed Bryan Cantrill's postmortems
and deep dives on Joyent all over the internet. Would love to see his take on
this EOL announcement.

Bryan, are you around?

~~~
bcantrill
In terms of my take, much of it is in the blog entry: it was a difficult
decision, especially because the public cloud is a big part of who we are.
It's very important to us to do right by our customers, and the team has been
very dedicated to doing everything we can to get affected customers onto new
infrastructure. Beyond the EOL of the JPC, we continue to serve our on-prem
customers -- and (to answer a question that came up elsewhere) our
technologies are and remain entirely open source.

------
foxhop
That sucks really badly... Sad customer here.

~~~
mpanama
Luckily the tech is still going strong, joyent and other are still there to
push forward. There are also EOL partners ([https://docs.joyent.com/joyent-
public-cloud-eol](https://docs.joyent.com/joyent-public-cloud-eol)) that you
can migrate to quite easily. (Hint; were one of them)

~~~
_delirium
Do any of the EOL partners run a public Manta install? I haven't found one
yet. To me that's one of the harder to replace parts of JPC.

------
Nux
I fondly remember Joyent as one of the first companies to do Ruby on Rails
hosting right. They were using a combo of FreeBSD, Virtualmin, Apache
(proxying to mongrel etc).

Fun times!

~~~
SwellJoe
They were probably our (Virtualmin) biggest user for a few years. They used
the Open Source version so we didn't see much revenue from it (occasionally
their users would upgrade to the commercial version), but they sponsored a few
Solaris-related features in Virtualmin/Webmin and sent us patches now and
then. The shared hosting stuff that used Virtualmin was TextDrive, and once
they moved to container-based products they stopped including a control panel
at some point (and they're container management stuff didn't use our tools for
that), so we lost touch with them.

Edit: It's also how Twitter used Virtualmin in their early days, as they were
hosted at Joyent. (I didn't know this until Evan Williams told me at a YC
event. That was pretty cool.)

~~~
jmarneweck
Evan was a lifetimer. Twitter's mail was routed via one.textdrive.com if
memory serves me correctly using a truck load of aliases to redirect to
offsite email accounts.

It was a pleasure dealing with the Virtualmin team on issues we had on
Virtualmin on Joyent and TextDrive's shared hosting services.

Replying to the "Wins over GCE/AWS above that I can't reply to":

They had various:

* The ability to run workloads at near bare metal speeds (their using Solaris Containers).

* Manta (ability to perform compute operations on their storage service without having to download files and reupload files).

* Their work on getting a better user experience in zones with pkgsrc (thanks to all the hard work of Filip and Jonathan).

* Better performance and having the ability to spend less money on resources and reducing the instance count for folks moving off AWS to Joyent. I was involved in a number of these migrations.

------
bovermyer
Oop. I know a former employer will now be scrambling to migrate their legacy
servers...

------
freezey00
Did anyone actually even use that thing?

------
njyx
Wow - brings back memories!

------
freezey00
not sure anyone really even used this thing.

------
new_realist
Could have been predicted seven years ago. Kudos for making it longer than
expected.

~~~
fragmede
Hindsight is 20/20.

Linode (founded 16 years ago), and Digital Ocean (founded 8 years ago), are
still alive and kicking, not to mention more traditional hosting companies
like HostGator.

~~~
nailer
DigitalOcean have no serverless product and just spent a bunch of engineering
resources on a new customer-managed Kubernetes setup.

The amount of people who are unsatisfied with DO's VM product and would be
satisfied with a k8s product is tiny. The amount of people who would like
somewhere to run functions and not care at all about infrastructure is growing
rapidly.

If they're not skating to where the puck is moving they won't be around much
longer.

~~~
johannes1234321
I won't neccisarily agree. There is space for "simple" hosting for some thing
which is a bit more than just a (static/wordpreess) website, but not a large
application, where cloud tooling setup is beneficial.

~~~
nailer
Sure but how much is that market growing?

~~~
johannes1234321
As long as it is sustainable business it should be fine for companies in this
domain.

