35 ms·

ClusterHQ is shutting down

248 points by henridf 10y ago

moondev 10y ago
Wow this surprising. I wonder what the reason for shutdown is? Flocker looked like a really cool product but was pretty involved setup wise when I was evaluating it. What are best options now for bare-metal? Ceph? NFS?
- wmf 10y ago
  Docker bought Infinit and will presumably integrate it into Docker Engine.
- Goopplesoft 10y ago
  Maybe the docker infinit acquisition[1] caused it? Given Kubernetes' plug and play storage classes (and gluster's maturity) + docker planning to add infinit natively there might not have been much space for them. http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/06/docker-acquires-file-syncing-and-sharing-app-infinit-will-open-source-the-software/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/06/docker-acquires-file-synci...
- lightedman 10y ago
  "What are best options now for bare-metal?" Writing it yourself in raw x86 ASM.
- lightedman 10y ago
  Looks like those flagging a post are too young to understand nothing gets closer to bare metal than THE DIRECT BARE METAL LANGUAGE ITSELF, and are probably so enchanted with the idea of Open Source that they don't know from real experience that you can only rely upon yourself. The shutting down of this company only proves as much.
- stevelandiss 10y ago
  Mostly people like you that thought it was a good product but never paid.
slantview 10y ago
Or maybe the technology wasn't correct for what most people are trying to do with Docker these days. Flocker never felt like it quite fit in the ecosystem along with Mesos, Kubernetes, etc. Great efforts guys, the tech is cool, but technology will continue to evolve and if you bought into something completely that doesn't fit nicely with the movement, you will get left behind. Edit: not sure why the downvotes, I was not being sarcastic. The comments about why "pioneers get arrows" in the post made it seem like they had a perfect product, the world was just not ready for it.
- moondev 10y ago
  Since when is Flocker competing with those platforms? It's designed to work with them. http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/volumes/#flocker http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/volumes/#flocker
  - slantview 10y ago
    I never said it was competing. I said it didn't seem to fit nicely. I run several very large clusters, and we evaluated Flocker and it didn't fit nicely into ecosystem. It felt very "bolted on".
    - moondev 10y ago
      I see, sorry for misunderstanding. What did you move to for persistent volumes?
      - slantview 10y ago
        We are using DC/OS (Mesos) and found it to be much more feature rich for what our needs were.
activatedgeek 10y ago
I remember trying to setup a Flocker cluster and got brainf*ed. A cert-based auth in local development clusters was probably an overkill.
- moondev 10y ago
  Same thing here. The barrier of entry was too frustrating for a casual evaluation.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
How many people were employed at ClusterHQ? Honestly I never even heard of the company but I had heard of some of the open source projects. Maybe I'm just out of the loop. Also any information as to lessons learned, etc? Basically why it failed? Looking at the marketing material I didn't see anything really remarkable about it (nothing that stood out as a "oh this is why I would give them money") so I'm curious. > I’ve been part of big successes as well as failures. While the former are more pleasurable, the latter must be relished as a valuable part of life, especially in Silicon Valley. Relished? I never really understood the Silicon Valley "failing is awesome!" mentality. Failure is failure. It's not awesome. Why would you relish it? Take the lessoned learned for sure but you likely just lost several people's money and you lost your employees their jobs, what is there to take enjoyment from? Seems a little sadistic and a tad lacking in empathy for others involved. But maybe that's just me.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- acidbaseextract 10y ago
  Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder and inventor of the Z-buffer, has a great take on mistakes and failure in his book Creativity, Inc. Here's a pretty decent summary: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/02/creativity-inc-ed-catmull-book/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/02/creativity-inc-ed-c... Essentially, we're going to fail. It happens. Might as well get it out of the way. Secondly, failure averse cultures don't actually prevent failures, and they have a tendency to squash innovation.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    > Secondly, failure averse cultures don't actually prevent failures, and they have a tendency to squash innovation. Celebrating failure and being failure averse have nothing to do with each other other than celebrating failure means you're probably not failure averse (but I would argue you lack empathy for the people you just lost money for and for the people you just lost jobs for).
  - geofft 10y ago
ferrantim 10y ago
This is Michael from ClusterHQ. Just wanted to say thanks to everyone in the community who helped make the last 2 and a half years a great experience. Sad that it's ending now, but excited for what's to come.
- zinssmeister 10y ago
  Michael, I appreciate this. I'm sure ClusterHQ was at times brutally hard work and you and team have worked hard on making things happen. I'm sorry it didn't work out and hopefully the future will be brighter with new lights.
- jat850 10y ago
  Thanks for posting, Michael, and I hope good things for you in the future. Do you foresee Flocker living on in opensource form?
  - ferrantim 10y ago
    Yes, Flocker will remain open-source and my hope is that the community continues to improve it. Fli too, btw, for creating and managing ZFS snapshots https://github.com/ClusterHQ/fli https://github.com/ClusterHQ/fli
    - jimjag 10y ago
      Maybe donation of the code to an FOSS foundation, like maybe Apache, might be a way of ensuring the community continues. Or, at least, gives it the fighting chance to do so... DM me if curious
      - ryao 10y ago
        I raised that question during the final company meeting yesterday. The ownership of the code is in limbo until the investors decide what to do with it at least a few months from now.
- shaybery 10y ago
wmf 10y ago
I appreciate the honest tone of this announcement without any "incredible journey" nonsense.
abrongersma 10y ago
That's a shame. I've always had great interactions with the ClusterHQ team. Michael, Mohit and Carissa have always been incredibly friendly when I've run into them at Dockercon. Unfortunately my engineering team was never able to fully integrate flocker into our production environment as we relied heavily on custom storage driver actions. Wish you folks all the best in your next projects.
chrissnell 10y ago
We've been running Kubernetes (500+ containers) in production for over a year now. I believe (and hope) that 2017 will be the year that persistent data storage will be solved. We are ready to move our data out of OpenStack and have our data services (Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB) join the rest of our apps on Kube-orchestrated infrastructure. But, we're not there yet. The options just aren't good enough. Look at the list of PV types for Kube [1]. You have technologies like Fibre Channel that are simply too expensive when compared with local storage on a Linux server. There's iSCSI, which is mostly the same story. Ceph is great for object storage but not performant enough for busy databases. GCE and AWS volumes are not applicable to our private cloud [2]. Cinder, to me, has the stench of OpenStack. Maybe it's better now? NFS? No way. Not performant. I'm looking forward to seeing what shakes out in the next few months. It's just really hard to beat local storage right now. [1] http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/persistent-volumes/#types-of-persistent-volumes http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/persistent-volumes/#typ... [2] Beyond a certain size, it becomes more cost-effective to host your own Kubernetes cluster on managed or colocated hardware.
- jat850 10y ago
  Curious if you've tried gluster at all. Using Kubernetes also and about to cross the threshold of stateful data - performance is important but not critical since we're using it in a fairly low volume, low throughput way, but it will grow over time and we want to future-proof it a bit. gluster seemed like the best-case fit for us but have done no empirical testing yet.
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  curious to know what you are doing right now ? I'm planning to deploy a redis cluster on a private cloud and am wondering what to use. do you use hostpath right now ?
  - chrissnell 10y ago
    We don't put any persistent data into Kube. Everything goes into OpenStack instances (Ubuntu), orchestrated by Chef. We hate it. OpenStack SDN has been flaky, Chef is a pain and doesn't support the latest Ubuntu releases well, none of the devs or technical ops engineers like it. It's my #1 goal for 2017: figure out persistent volumes for Kube.
Animats 10y ago
Maybe "stateful containers" aren't a good idea. The whole point of containers is supposed to be that they can be duplicated and loaded into many machine instances. "Stateful containers" with changing databases inside can't be treated that way.
Johnny555 10y ago
It seems a little odd to do this 3 days before Christmas. Holiday depression is already a real problem, and making people unemployed a few days before the holiday sounds like a bad thing. And it's a terrible time to be job hunting. Why not hold on a few more weeks, let employees enjoy the holidays and announce in mid-January when employees can actually talk to hiring managers and get some good job prospects instead of being met with out of office messages?
- mangeletti 10y ago
  It's likely that people within the organization already knew things weren't going well. So, the bright side of this is that: A) employees can spend the entire holiday week or two with their families, and B) employees can start out their new year unencumbered by the stress of working for a failing company Personally, I'd rather have it this way than come back from whatever fun holiday adventure I'm on to find out a week later that I'm losing my job... that's a terrible way to start the year's momentum.
  - Johnny555 10y ago
    Sure, there could be mitigating circumstances, but I've worked for a startup that folded just after Christmas while the office was closed for the holiday, we were all fired by phone. It sucked. Spending the holidays with family can be even more stress inducing when you've just learned that you lost your job. No ability to go out with local friends or former coworkers to commiserate about being fired and talk about job prospects. I was too distracted with job searching to really relax and enjoy time with family. Rumor was that the investors pulled the plug before the end of the year for tax reasons, but I'm skeptical since it took months to sell off assets (physical and virtual) and wind down the business. I made out pretty well though, got a lucrative contract with the company that bought the core software to keep it running for them until they could merge it into their systems.
  - ryao 10y ago
    I am not sure if even the CEO knew that sufficient venture capital to succeed was unavailable until all avenues had been exhausted. I had a hint that things were not going well when my request for equipment was denied until round B funding was raised.
zitterbewegung 10y ago
So whats next for the software projects by ClusterHQ? Making them a part of an Apache Incubator?
finid 10y ago
A little bit more info on why the outfit failed would have been nice.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  They probably just ran out of money or a key relationship dried up causing their runway to become impossibly short.
plandis 10y ago
They are ceasing all operations. Someone might want to update their careers page.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  Or their home page.
jcoffland 10y ago
This is why it's a really bad idea to rely on PaaS/SaaS for your next project. When the company tanks (or cancels the product, changes the API, raises it's prices, etc.) you're screwed. Hope no one out there was heavily commited to FlockerHub. What we really need is better business models for supporting Open-Source.
- gkoberger 10y ago
  Counter argument: if you don't rely on PaaS/SaaS, it'll take you 3-4x to launch. So, rely on them, but be ready to switch. A few bad things like this shouldn't take away from how services enable rapid development and iteration of ideas.
  - dsp1234 10y ago
    Try getting log files/historical data from a company that shuts it's doors without notice.
  - jcoffland 10y ago
    Why would it take you 3-4x longer to launch? Running your own servers in the cloud is not that hard. You can actually save time by not being restricted by the PaaS. I.e. if you have special needs, and you will, you can go in and hack the software.
    - karthikb 10y ago
      If you don't have special needs, then you as a small team or company are taking on a burden that is large enough in scope for an entire company to focus on. It's why most startups just use GMail instead rolling their own. Sure it's easy to set up an email server, but now it's one more thing to think about.
      - jcoffland 10y ago
        GMail is a bad example. If GMail were to close you could just move to another email server. Besides, using a PaaS is not free and I don't mean in terms of money.
calgaryeng 10y ago
- December 22, 2016: ClusterF*ed - December 15, 2016: Reflecting on a Year of Change and What’s to Come in 2017 ("All in all, 2016 was full of tests and triumphs and I can promise that 2017 will also be a big year for the company.") I'll be the first to admit I don't know anything about this company, but that's an interesting change of heart.
- dsp1234 10y ago
  For reference, here is the post from 12/15 where the statement, " I can promise that 2017 will also be a big year for the company" was made by the CTO. Having the CTO make that statement, knowing that the company was shutting down, seems odd. Which implies it was not an orderly shutdown. https://clusterhq.com/2016/12/15/container-predictions/ https://clusterhq.com/2016/12/15/container-predictions/
  - mathattack 10y ago
    And that the CTO wasn't kept in the loop.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
      Or the Wotton hypothesis: "An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country."
- ryao 10y ago
  As a former ClusterHQ employee who had been with the company longer than our CEO, I should be able to shed some light on this. The plan was to raise round A funding two years ago (which we did) and then raise round B funding now before becoming profitable 2 to 3 years from now. Venture capitalists have become far more risk adverse. We all thought that round B funding would happen, but it fell apart at the last minute and instead of announcing round B funding, Mark announced a shutdown.
gtirloni 10y ago
Oh the immediate shutdowns! After going through the immediate Nebula shutdown, I'm glad we weren't depending on ClusterHQ. Same question I had for Nebula: you had no idea that a month ago you'd have to shutdown, right? I've started to follow these ex-CEOs so we avoid their next companies. This kind of shutdown is just terrible.
- hoodoof 10y ago
  CEOs are trying to keep the company going. It would make no sense for every CEO whopse company is a month away from shutdown to be announcing "listen just to let you know, we are a month away from shutdown, but we are trying to find the money to keep going". For many companies this is the default state of operation and undoubtedly many companies have gone from that state to great success. What would employees and customers do in the face of such an announcement? If you have ever been CEO of an ordinary company trying ot build a business then you'd understand.
  - jasoncchild 10y ago
    Indeed. There is also the fact that internal and external messaging is likely much different. I'd not be too surprised if there hadn't been some attrition within their ranks (especially devs) leading up to this point.
- tlb 10y ago
  Many -- probably most -- ultimately very successful companies had near-death experiences. They aren't usually written about. Apple's near-death in 1997 is well documented. Tesla's is described in Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk. http://foundersatwork.com/ http://foundersatwork.com/ has firsthand stories about some others. They would have become full-death experiences if the CEO had said, "Hey everybody, we're near death, just FYI". So in the alternative world where company deaths are always announced well in advance, far more companies would die. Probably not a better world. I don't know the story here, but in most cases there was some deal on the table that would have saved the company but fell through in the couple of days before the announcement. Regardless, the right thing is to have enough payroll in reserve for an orderly shutdown and transition plan for customers. It's not clear whether that's happening here -- I hope so.
jrochkind1 10y ago
> please accept our enduring, deeply felt gratitude. Sure, but would 'apologies' have been out of order too?
FrankenPC 10y ago
I should make a startup called Trampoline. Other startups pay me insurance premiums and I hop in with a team and salaries for ejected employees to keep doors open for however long they paid for after a crash. As part of the customer SLA they cite Trampoline and the duration of post mortem life being paid for.
- doublerebel 10y ago
  I like this idea, but I wonder how it would affect the business decisions of founders once they know they have a safety net.
schmichael 10y ago
If we're going to celebrate failure can we at least fail with respect, humility, and maybe even a tiny bit of class? The word "sorry" does not appear in this post. Instead of apologizing to investors, users, and employees for letting all of them down the CEO writes a contentless self-aggrandizing post. The CEO also doesn't bother to thank anyone despite being literally and metaphorically indebted to investors, users, and employees for getting as far as they did. [Update: there was "gratitude" - my mistake; sorry] Besides the self-aggrandizing "we did it first" tone of the whole post, here are a few more parts I'd love to see future farewell posts skip: > it’s often the pioneers who end up with arrows in their backs Unless your point is that you were a company who tried to take what wasn't yours and was punished for it... this phrase is awkward-at-best. > I called these “Friends of ClusterHQ” by the sobriquet “FoCkers” The use of "sobriquet" doesn't make your adolescent play on words classy. > The big successes are literally impossible without the many failures. Take a moment to think about that. What a ridiculous thing to tell your audience that includes employees looking for jobs, investors out of money, and users without a service they may have depended on. Out of those 3 groups only investors care about such things. The other 2 groups are collateral damage to your hubris.
- cryptarch 10y ago
  > I called these “Friends of ClusterHQ” by the sobriquet “FoCkers” To me this just sounds like a shot at irony by combining crudity with eloquence, fully agree with your sentiment though. Mark Davis is pretty tone-deaf, it reads like "hahaha good times, didn't we have a good run, FoCkers?" while the message is "here's a bunch of problems and you probably need to work overtime".
- danpalmer 10y ago
  > The CEO also doesn't bother to thank anyone despite being literally and metaphorically indebted to investors, users, and employees for getting as far as they did. "To all the employees, customers, users, investors, advisors, partners, competitors, consultants, analysts, and vendors who helped us – there are thousands of you, and you know who you are – please accept our enduring, deeply felt gratitude."
  - 10y ago
alex_hitchins 10y ago
Could this be in any way akin to the shutdown of Lavabit? I know it's not the same type of company, but if there was pressure to put back doors in or any sort of compromise, I would support the action. If not, then it's a really bad way to shut up shop. OK the source is out there but given the holiday season people might have appreciated a little warning.
- robhaswell 10y ago
  Hi, founder of ClusterHQ here. I was just reminiscing over the demise of my company, and saw this comment had not been replied to. I can categorically state that there was no pressure to install back-doors or any Lavabit-style problems. As for your other comment, as a business you don't get to choose when you run out of money. I believe there was a plan to secure more money, and when that plan failed the employees were told immediately. The timing is irrelevant.
  - alex_hitchins 10y ago
    Thank you for the comment. I appreciate as a business you don't have complete control of your destiny. There is a fine line between keeping employees informed and scaring them witless and I appreciate you were doing the right thing for your company. I or anyone else would likely have done the same in your situation.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
> Mark Davis (CEO) explains this opportunity as, “Imagine if you were the 10th engineer at VMware. That’s the kind of experience you’re going to have with us at ClusterHQ.” That was from a clusterHQ recruiter's email that I received just a week ago. I thought it was weird to sell a position in that way. I don't find it unreasonable that a recruiter was hiring people while the company is closing down (what do they know?) I'm reminded it's always important to ask for specific financial information when hopping on to a startup. What's your revenue? Expenses? How long is your runway? My condolences to anyone who had hope, time, and effort invested in clusterHQ stock options.
sidi 10y ago
It would be interesting to hear what are the alternatives now to what they were trying to do with [flocker](https://clusterhq.com/flocker/introduction/ https://clusterhq.com/flocker/introduction/). The post seems to make the point other alternatives came up that removed their competitive advantage. Anyone here either using flocker or the other alternatives?
stevelandiss 10y ago
You can't easily make a company out of selling free stuff?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
EDreicer 10y ago
How is this company shut down? Almost the same day my Us-based company officially announces to close down, but we haven't been paid since June 2016. I really want to know if this happens in Us See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242516 Thanks
aorth 10y ago
I'm sad to hear this. I loved reading Richard Yao's blog posts about ZFS on Linux. https://clusterhq.com/2014/09/11/state-zfs-on-linux/ https://clusterhq.com/2014/09/11/state-zfs-on-linux/
afulay 10y ago
Its not like good container storage solutions don't exist for databases and other stateful applications. The problem is in expecting it to be free and open source. Building orchestration or simple file or object storage is easy, but building high performance, resilient, scale out storage that can run on cheap commodity boxes is a difficult task. Once you get over the "free" requirement, there are some good options like ScaleIO and Robin Systems. https://robinsystems.com/containerization-platform-enterprise-applications/ https://robinsystems.com/containerization-platform-enterpris...

248 points by henridf 10y ago

Wow this surprising. I wonder what the reason for shutdown is? Flocker looked like a really cool product but was pretty involved setup wise when I was evaluating it. What are best options now for bare-metal? Ceph? NFS?

wmf 10y ago
Docker bought Infinit and will presumably integrate it into Docker Engine.
Goopplesoft 10y ago
Maybe the docker infinit acquisition[1] caused it? Given Kubernetes' plug and play storage classes (and gluster's maturity) + docker planning to add infinit natively there might not have been much space for them. http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/06/docker-acquires-file-syncing-and-sharing-app-infinit-will-open-source-the-software/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/06/docker-acquires-file-synci...
lightedman 10y ago
"What are best options now for bare-metal?" Writing it yourself in raw x86 ASM.
lightedman 10y ago
Looks like those flagging a post are too young to understand nothing gets closer to bare metal than THE DIRECT BARE METAL LANGUAGE ITSELF, and are probably so enchanted with the idea of Open Source that they don't know from real experience that you can only rely upon yourself. The shutting down of this company only proves as much.
stevelandiss 10y ago
Mostly people like you that thought it was a good product but never paid.

slantview 10y ago

Or maybe the technology wasn't correct for what most people are trying to do with Docker these days. Flocker never felt like it quite fit in the ecosystem along with Mesos, Kubernetes, etc. Great efforts guys, the tech is cool, but technology will continue to evolve and if you bought into something completely that doesn't fit nicely with the movement, you will get left behind. Edit: not sure why the downvotes, I was not being sarcastic. The comments about why "pioneers get arrows" in the post made it seem like they had a perfect product, the world was just not ready for it.

moondev 10y ago
Since when is Flocker competing with those platforms? It's designed to work with them. http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/volumes/#flocker http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/volumes/#flocker
- slantview 10y ago
  I never said it was competing. I said it didn't seem to fit nicely. I run several very large clusters, and we evaluated Flocker and it didn't fit nicely into ecosystem. It felt very "bolted on".
  - moondev 10y ago
    I see, sorry for misunderstanding. What did you move to for persistent volumes?
    - slantview 10y ago
      We are using DC/OS (Mesos) and found it to be much more feature rich for what our needs were.

activatedgeek 10y ago

I remember trying to setup a Flocker cluster and got brainf*ed. A cert-based auth in local development clusters was probably an overkill.

moondev 10y ago
Same thing here. The barrier of entry was too frustrating for a casual evaluation.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

How many people were employed at ClusterHQ? Honestly I never even heard of the company but I had heard of some of the open source projects. Maybe I'm just out of the loop. Also any information as to lessons learned, etc? Basically why it failed? Looking at the marketing material I didn't see anything really remarkable about it (nothing that stood out as a "oh this is why I would give them money") so I'm curious. > I’ve been part of big successes as well as failures. While the former are more pleasurable, the latter must be relished as a valuable part of life, especially in Silicon Valley. Relished? I never really understood the Silicon Valley "failing is awesome!" mentality. Failure is failure. It's not awesome. Why would you relish it? Take the lessoned learned for sure but you likely just lost several people's money and you lost your employees their jobs, what is there to take enjoyment from? Seems a little sadistic and a tad lacking in empathy for others involved. But maybe that's just me.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
acidbaseextract 10y ago
Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder and inventor of the Z-buffer, has a great take on mistakes and failure in his book Creativity, Inc. Here's a pretty decent summary: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/02/creativity-inc-ed-catmull-book/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/02/creativity-inc-ed-c... Essentially, we're going to fail. It happens. Might as well get it out of the way. Secondly, failure averse cultures don't actually prevent failures, and they have a tendency to squash innovation.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  > Secondly, failure averse cultures don't actually prevent failures, and they have a tendency to squash innovation. Celebrating failure and being failure averse have nothing to do with each other other than celebrating failure means you're probably not failure averse (but I would argue you lack empathy for the people you just lost money for and for the people you just lost jobs for).
- geofft 10y ago

ferrantim 10y ago

This is Michael from ClusterHQ. Just wanted to say thanks to everyone in the community who helped make the last 2 and a half years a great experience. Sad that it's ending now, but excited for what's to come.

zinssmeister 10y ago
Michael, I appreciate this. I'm sure ClusterHQ was at times brutally hard work and you and team have worked hard on making things happen. I'm sorry it didn't work out and hopefully the future will be brighter with new lights.
jat850 10y ago
Thanks for posting, Michael, and I hope good things for you in the future. Do you foresee Flocker living on in opensource form?
- ferrantim 10y ago
  Yes, Flocker will remain open-source and my hope is that the community continues to improve it. Fli too, btw, for creating and managing ZFS snapshots https://github.com/ClusterHQ/fli https://github.com/ClusterHQ/fli
  - jimjag 10y ago
    Maybe donation of the code to an FOSS foundation, like maybe Apache, might be a way of ensuring the community continues. Or, at least, gives it the fighting chance to do so... DM me if curious
    - ryao 10y ago
      I raised that question during the final company meeting yesterday. The ownership of the code is in limbo until the investors decide what to do with it at least a few months from now.
shaybery 10y ago

wmf 10y ago

I appreciate the honest tone of this announcement without any "incredible journey" nonsense.

abrongersma 10y ago

That's a shame. I've always had great interactions with the ClusterHQ team. Michael, Mohit and Carissa have always been incredibly friendly when I've run into them at Dockercon. Unfortunately my engineering team was never able to fully integrate flocker into our production environment as we relied heavily on custom storage driver actions. Wish you folks all the best in your next projects.

chrissnell 10y ago

We've been running Kubernetes (500+ containers) in production for over a year now. I believe (and hope) that 2017 will be the year that persistent data storage will be solved. We are ready to move our data out of OpenStack and have our data services (Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB) join the rest of our apps on Kube-orchestrated infrastructure. But, we're not there yet. The options just aren't good enough. Look at the list of PV types for Kube [1]. You have technologies like Fibre Channel that are simply too expensive when compared with local storage on a Linux server. There's iSCSI, which is mostly the same story. Ceph is great for object storage but not performant enough for busy databases. GCE and AWS volumes are not applicable to our private cloud [2]. Cinder, to me, has the stench of OpenStack. Maybe it's better now? NFS? No way. Not performant. I'm looking forward to seeing what shakes out in the next few months. It's just really hard to beat local storage right now. [1] http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/persistent-volumes/#types-of-persistent-volumes http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/persistent-volumes/#typ... [2] Beyond a certain size, it becomes more cost-effective to host your own Kubernetes cluster on managed or colocated hardware.

jat850 10y ago
Curious if you've tried gluster at all. Using Kubernetes also and about to cross the threshold of stateful data - performance is important but not critical since we're using it in a fairly low volume, low throughput way, but it will grow over time and we want to future-proof it a bit. gluster seemed like the best-case fit for us but have done no empirical testing yet.
sandGorgon 10y ago
curious to know what you are doing right now ? I'm planning to deploy a redis cluster on a private cloud and am wondering what to use. do you use hostpath right now ?
- chrissnell 10y ago
  We don't put any persistent data into Kube. Everything goes into OpenStack instances (Ubuntu), orchestrated by Chef. We hate it. OpenStack SDN has been flaky, Chef is a pain and doesn't support the latest Ubuntu releases well, none of the devs or technical ops engineers like it. It's my #1 goal for 2017: figure out persistent volumes for Kube.

Animats 10y ago

Maybe "stateful containers" aren't a good idea. The whole point of containers is supposed to be that they can be duplicated and loaded into many machine instances. "Stateful containers" with changing databases inside can't be treated that way.

Johnny555 10y ago

It seems a little odd to do this 3 days before Christmas. Holiday depression is already a real problem, and making people unemployed a few days before the holiday sounds like a bad thing. And it's a terrible time to be job hunting. Why not hold on a few more weeks, let employees enjoy the holidays and announce in mid-January when employees can actually talk to hiring managers and get some good job prospects instead of being met with out of office messages?

mangeletti 10y ago
It's likely that people within the organization already knew things weren't going well. So, the bright side of this is that: A) employees can spend the entire holiday week or two with their families, and B) employees can start out their new year unencumbered by the stress of working for a failing company Personally, I'd rather have it this way than come back from whatever fun holiday adventure I'm on to find out a week later that I'm losing my job... that's a terrible way to start the year's momentum.
- Johnny555 10y ago
  Sure, there could be mitigating circumstances, but I've worked for a startup that folded just after Christmas while the office was closed for the holiday, we were all fired by phone. It sucked. Spending the holidays with family can be even more stress inducing when you've just learned that you lost your job. No ability to go out with local friends or former coworkers to commiserate about being fired and talk about job prospects. I was too distracted with job searching to really relax and enjoy time with family. Rumor was that the investors pulled the plug before the end of the year for tax reasons, but I'm skeptical since it took months to sell off assets (physical and virtual) and wind down the business. I made out pretty well though, got a lucrative contract with the company that bought the core software to keep it running for them until they could merge it into their systems.
- ryao 10y ago
  I am not sure if even the CEO knew that sufficient venture capital to succeed was unavailable until all avenues had been exhausted. I had a hint that things were not going well when my request for equipment was denied until round B funding was raised.

zitterbewegung 10y ago

So whats next for the software projects by ClusterHQ? Making them a part of an Apache Incubator?

finid 10y ago

A little bit more info on why the outfit failed would have been nice.

dexterdog 10y ago
They probably just ran out of money or a key relationship dried up causing their runway to become impossibly short.

plandis 10y ago

They are ceasing all operations. Someone might want to update their careers page.

dexterdog 10y ago
Or their home page.

jcoffland 10y ago

This is why it's a really bad idea to rely on PaaS/SaaS for your next project. When the company tanks (or cancels the product, changes the API, raises it's prices, etc.) you're screwed. Hope no one out there was heavily commited to FlockerHub. What we really need is better business models for supporting Open-Source.

gkoberger 10y ago
Counter argument: if you don't rely on PaaS/SaaS, it'll take you 3-4x to launch. So, rely on them, but be ready to switch. A few bad things like this shouldn't take away from how services enable rapid development and iteration of ideas.
- dsp1234 10y ago
  Try getting log files/historical data from a company that shuts it's doors without notice.
- jcoffland 10y ago
  Why would it take you 3-4x longer to launch? Running your own servers in the cloud is not that hard. You can actually save time by not being restricted by the PaaS. I.e. if you have special needs, and you will, you can go in and hack the software.
  - karthikb 10y ago
    If you don't have special needs, then you as a small team or company are taking on a burden that is large enough in scope for an entire company to focus on. It's why most startups just use GMail instead rolling their own. Sure it's easy to set up an email server, but now it's one more thing to think about.
    - jcoffland 10y ago
      GMail is a bad example. If GMail were to close you could just move to another email server. Besides, using a PaaS is not free and I don't mean in terms of money.

calgaryeng 10y ago

- December 22, 2016: ClusterF*ed - December 15, 2016: Reflecting on a Year of Change and What’s to Come in 2017 ("All in all, 2016 was full of tests and triumphs and I can promise that 2017 will also be a big year for the company.") I'll be the first to admit I don't know anything about this company, but that's an interesting change of heart.

dsp1234 10y ago
For reference, here is the post from 12/15 where the statement, " I can promise that 2017 will also be a big year for the company" was made by the CTO. Having the CTO make that statement, knowing that the company was shutting down, seems odd. Which implies it was not an orderly shutdown. https://clusterhq.com/2016/12/15/container-predictions/ https://clusterhq.com/2016/12/15/container-predictions/
- mathattack 10y ago
  And that the CTO wasn't kept in the loop.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
    Or the Wotton hypothesis: "An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country."
ryao 10y ago
As a former ClusterHQ employee who had been with the company longer than our CEO, I should be able to shed some light on this. The plan was to raise round A funding two years ago (which we did) and then raise round B funding now before becoming profitable 2 to 3 years from now. Venture capitalists have become far more risk adverse. We all thought that round B funding would happen, but it fell apart at the last minute and instead of announcing round B funding, Mark announced a shutdown.

gtirloni 10y ago

Oh the immediate shutdowns! After going through the immediate Nebula shutdown, I'm glad we weren't depending on ClusterHQ. Same question I had for Nebula: you had no idea that a month ago you'd have to shutdown, right? I've started to follow these ex-CEOs so we avoid their next companies. This kind of shutdown is just terrible.

hoodoof 10y ago
CEOs are trying to keep the company going. It would make no sense for every CEO whopse company is a month away from shutdown to be announcing "listen just to let you know, we are a month away from shutdown, but we are trying to find the money to keep going". For many companies this is the default state of operation and undoubtedly many companies have gone from that state to great success. What would employees and customers do in the face of such an announcement? If you have ever been CEO of an ordinary company trying ot build a business then you'd understand.
- jasoncchild 10y ago
  Indeed. There is also the fact that internal and external messaging is likely much different. I'd not be too surprised if there hadn't been some attrition within their ranks (especially devs) leading up to this point.
tlb 10y ago
Many -- probably most -- ultimately very successful companies had near-death experiences. They aren't usually written about. Apple's near-death in 1997 is well documented. Tesla's is described in Ashlee Vance's biography of Musk. http://foundersatwork.com/ http://foundersatwork.com/ has firsthand stories about some others. They would have become full-death experiences if the CEO had said, "Hey everybody, we're near death, just FYI". So in the alternative world where company deaths are always announced well in advance, far more companies would die. Probably not a better world. I don't know the story here, but in most cases there was some deal on the table that would have saved the company but fell through in the couple of days before the announcement. Regardless, the right thing is to have enough payroll in reserve for an orderly shutdown and transition plan for customers. It's not clear whether that's happening here -- I hope so.

jrochkind1 10y ago

> please accept our enduring, deeply felt gratitude. Sure, but would 'apologies' have been out of order too?

FrankenPC 10y ago

I should make a startup called Trampoline. Other startups pay me insurance premiums and I hop in with a team and salaries for ejected employees to keep doors open for however long they paid for after a crash. As part of the customer SLA they cite Trampoline and the duration of post mortem life being paid for.

doublerebel 10y ago
I like this idea, but I wonder how it would affect the business decisions of founders once they know they have a safety net.

schmichael 10y ago

If we're going to celebrate failure can we at least fail with respect, humility, and maybe even a tiny bit of class? The word "sorry" does not appear in this post. Instead of apologizing to investors, users, and employees for letting all of them down the CEO writes a contentless self-aggrandizing post. The CEO also doesn't bother to thank anyone despite being literally and metaphorically indebted to investors, users, and employees for getting as far as they did. [Update: there was "gratitude" - my mistake; sorry] Besides the self-aggrandizing "we did it first" tone of the whole post, here are a few more parts I'd love to see future farewell posts skip: > it’s often the pioneers who end up with arrows in their backs Unless your point is that you were a company who tried to take what wasn't yours and was punished for it... this phrase is awkward-at-best. > I called these “Friends of ClusterHQ” by the sobriquet “FoCkers” The use of "sobriquet" doesn't make your adolescent play on words classy. > The big successes are literally impossible without the many failures. Take a moment to think about that. What a ridiculous thing to tell your audience that includes employees looking for jobs, investors out of money, and users without a service they may have depended on. Out of those 3 groups only investors care about such things. The other 2 groups are collateral damage to your hubris.

cryptarch 10y ago
> I called these “Friends of ClusterHQ” by the sobriquet “FoCkers” To me this just sounds like a shot at irony by combining crudity with eloquence, fully agree with your sentiment though. Mark Davis is pretty tone-deaf, it reads like "hahaha good times, didn't we have a good run, FoCkers?" while the message is "here's a bunch of problems and you probably need to work overtime".
danpalmer 10y ago
> The CEO also doesn't bother to thank anyone despite being literally and metaphorically indebted to investors, users, and employees for getting as far as they did. "To all the employees, customers, users, investors, advisors, partners, competitors, consultants, analysts, and vendors who helped us – there are thousands of you, and you know who you are – please accept our enduring, deeply felt gratitude."
- 10y ago

alex_hitchins 10y ago

Could this be in any way akin to the shutdown of Lavabit? I know it's not the same type of company, but if there was pressure to put back doors in or any sort of compromise, I would support the action. If not, then it's a really bad way to shut up shop. OK the source is out there but given the holiday season people might have appreciated a little warning.

robhaswell 10y ago
Hi, founder of ClusterHQ here. I was just reminiscing over the demise of my company, and saw this comment had not been replied to. I can categorically state that there was no pressure to install back-doors or any Lavabit-style problems. As for your other comment, as a business you don't get to choose when you run out of money. I believe there was a plan to secure more money, and when that plan failed the employees were told immediately. The timing is irrelevant.
- alex_hitchins 10y ago
  Thank you for the comment. I appreciate as a business you don't have complete control of your destiny. There is a fine line between keeping employees informed and scaring them witless and I appreciate you were doing the right thing for your company. I or anyone else would likely have done the same in your situation.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

> Mark Davis (CEO) explains this opportunity as, “Imagine if you were the 10th engineer at VMware. That’s the kind of experience you’re going to have with us at ClusterHQ.” That was from a clusterHQ recruiter's email that I received just a week ago. I thought it was weird to sell a position in that way. I don't find it unreasonable that a recruiter was hiring people while the company is closing down (what do they know?) I'm reminded it's always important to ask for specific financial information when hopping on to a startup. What's your revenue? Expenses? How long is your runway? My condolences to anyone who had hope, time, and effort invested in clusterHQ stock options.

sidi 10y ago

It would be interesting to hear what are the alternatives now to what they were trying to do with [flocker](https://clusterhq.com/flocker/introduction/ https://clusterhq.com/flocker/introduction/). The post seems to make the point other alternatives came up that removed their competitive advantage. Anyone here either using flocker or the other alternatives?

stevelandiss 10y ago

You can't easily make a company out of selling free stuff?

deleted 10y ago

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EDreicer 10y ago

How is this company shut down? Almost the same day my Us-based company officially announces to close down, but we haven't been paid since June 2016. I really want to know if this happens in Us See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242516 Thanks

aorth 10y ago

I'm sad to hear this. I loved reading Richard Yao's blog posts about ZFS on Linux. https://clusterhq.com/2014/09/11/state-zfs-on-linux/ https://clusterhq.com/2014/09/11/state-zfs-on-linux/

afulay 10y ago

Its not like good container storage solutions don't exist for databases and other stateful applications. The problem is in expecting it to be free and open source. Building orchestration or simple file or object storage is easy, but building high performance, resilient, scale out storage that can run on cheap commodity boxes is a difficult task. Once you get over the "free" requirement, there are some good options like ScaleIO and Robin Systems. https://robinsystems.com/containerization-platform-enterprise-applications/ https://robinsystems.com/containerization-platform-enterpris...