26 ms·

Joyent Public Cloud EOL

317 points by rubin55 7y ago

equalunique 7y ago
I have been a fan of Joyent's tech for several years now. This change seems like a scary one. Wishing them luck.
rubin55 7y ago
Here's a blog explaining the decision : https://www.joyent.com/blog/joyent-announces-strategic-change-to-their-public-cloud-business https://www.joyent.com/blog/joyent-announces-strategic-chang...
- Annatar 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
    - Annatar 7y ago
      Yep, I could easily imagine Bryan being crushed by this. I know I would be, knowing I have superior technology to anyone else and yet being told I have to withdraw from the competition. It's like coming to a race track with a car and being disqualified because one's car is too light and powerful.
      - cryptonector 7y ago
        I don't know Bryan personally -I wish I did-, but I am pretty sure he's hard to crush. There's always something else to do. Many of us Solaris Engineering refugees have gone on to do other things. And trust me, for me it was hard and still is because I don't yet get to use the new Linux eBPF stuff daily and w/o privilege for the equivalent of DTrace USDT, and I also don't get to use ZoL, and because systemd is a very poor not-SMF, and because there is no FMA for Linux, and because epoll makes me sad, and so on and on. But I don't dwell on all the mistakes made by Sun's executives from 2000-2010 (and they made so many terrible mistakes), not often. Since that seems popular in this thread, I'll tell you what I think those mistakes were (some of which Oracle is still making): - clinging to dying business (SPARC, J2ME) to the point that other, better business was forgone to avoid cannibalizing / competing with the dying business - killing Sun PS (2002) - insisting on unacceptable-to-Google licensing terms for Solaris (2002) - suspending Solaris x86 development (2002) - selling Sun to Oracle There are more bad decisions, including buying MySQL (which was instantly forked, and that US$1bn price tag hurt). Oddly, the torch of OS innovation has passed to MSFT. Not so odd, really, when you realize that MSFT learned the lessons of stack ranking (don't do it). And MSFT already had learned the lesson that to survive disruptions you must pivot. Bryan clearly learned those lessons early, so I think he'll be fine.
foxhop 7y ago
That sucks really badly... Sad customer here.
- brianwawok 7y ago
  What was their win over AWS or GCE?
  - e12e 7y ago
    Not a customer, but their main differentiator was co-locality of data and compute resources, leading to better utilization/lower communication overhead. The use of Solaris, their port of kvm etc were implementation details. Sorry to see them go, one of the few "cloud" providers that actually seemed to to some creative thinking on the architecture side.
    - Thaxll 7y ago
      Yeah how can you compete against AWS / x86 / Linux on that space not sure.
      - Annatar 7y ago
        With technology which is an order of magnitude more concerned with reliability and easier to use than any competition out there, that's how.
        dijit 7y ago
        Apparently not.
        user5994461 7y ago
        There is nothing that can be an order of magnitude better than DO/AWS/GCE on multiple aspects.
tjfontaine 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- dymk 7y ago
  > Joyeurs Please tell me this is a play on the word Voyeurs
joeblubaugh 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    If anyone's curious, some of that history was documented here: http://billturner.github.io/2014/02/28/whats-happened-to-textdrive/ http://billturner.github.io/2014/02/28/whats-happened-to-tex...
    - mzs 7y ago
      earlier context: https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/16/cloud-computing-company-joyent-leaves-early-supporters-out-in-the-cold/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/16/cloud-computing-company-jo...
    - eli 7y ago
      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.
- imperialdrive 7y ago
  If anyone reading this has less than 100 servers running with them, I am capable to handle turnkey documented migration in <60 days to a provider of your choice.
new_realist 7y ago
Could have been predicted seven years ago. Kudos for making it longer than expected.
- fragmede 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        Sure but how much is that market growing?
        johannes1234321 7y ago
        As long as it is sustainable business it should be fine for companies in this domain.
    - dboreham 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
berns 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  Fun fact, in 2008 Joyent was Twitter’s host and asked them to leave.
  - gbrown_ 7y ago
    Source? I've not heard that take and would be curious to read more about it.
    - randylahey 7y ago
      https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/31/twitter-and-joyent-split-amidst-downtime-travails/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/31/twitter-and-joyent-split-a...
      - saurik 7y ago
        This article makes it sound more like Twitter left the relationship because Joyent wasn't delivering on performance and stability.
    - davidpaulyoung 7y ago
      It's true.
      - velcrovan 7y ago
        I even wrote a little poem about it at the time: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/birds https://thelocalyarn.com/article/birds
  - TimTheTinker 7y ago
TimTheTinker 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Good memories! https://davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-joyent/ https://davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-joy...
    - jmarneweck 7y ago
      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.
  - jonathonf 7y ago
    Strongspace still exists and is still hosting the VC storage accounts which Joyent shed (or at least, I think so... parts of their site seem to be dead). ExpanDrive's "Cloud drive client software" is also well worth looking into.
- anonymouz 7y ago
  They'll forever remain on my mind for their rip-off "lifetime hosting". I paid a lot of money for it, and it was supposed to last while the company lasted. But then they were folded into Joyent and the lifetime deals discontinued (with just a little bit limited time hosting offered in compensation). I have stayed away from them forever since, and warned everybody I could about their terrible business practices.
skrebbel 7y ago
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.
- noir_lord 7y ago
  They where a company that was around when node took off, so they offered products and services around that. Last I heard Samsung had acquired them.
  - traek 7y ago
    Joyent created Node.js
    - randylahey 7y ago
      Ryan Dahl created Node.js prior to being hired at Joyent, and then sold them the rights to it.
      - lurkertroll 7y ago
        He also created many great childrens books
      - httpsterio 7y ago
        The iojs debacle was because joyent had too much governance of the project and it was subsequently handed over to the board that currently governs nodejs. While the first Iines of what became nodejs weren't written by joyent, they can be quite reliably be credited to being the company that made it happen originally.
jpgvm 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
bovermyer 7y ago
Oop. I know a former employer will now be scrambling to migrate their legacy servers...
jiveturkey 7y ago
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.
ericfrederich 7y ago
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.
saurik 7y ago
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 :(.
freezey00 7y ago
not sure anyone really even used this thing.
warp_factor 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
Nux 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
  - Nux 7y ago
    That's a nice bit of trivia! Had no idea Twitter started on Virtualmin at Joyent.
freezey00 7y ago
Did anyone actually even use that thing?
njyx 7y ago
Wow - brings back memories!
joyent 7y ago
I just hate their stupid shitty name. Joyent. What an awful fucking name. It's like the word you'd use to describe the sensation of injecting dish soap into your urethra.

317 points by rubin55 7y ago

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

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

Annatar 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - Annatar 7y ago
    Yep, I could easily imagine Bryan being crushed by this. I know I would be, knowing I have superior technology to anyone else and yet being told I have to withdraw from the competition. It's like coming to a race track with a car and being disqualified because one's car is too light and powerful.
    - cryptonector 7y ago
      I don't know Bryan personally -I wish I did-, but I am pretty sure he's hard to crush. There's always something else to do. Many of us Solaris Engineering refugees have gone on to do other things. And trust me, for me it was hard and still is because I don't yet get to use the new Linux eBPF stuff daily and w/o privilege for the equivalent of DTrace USDT, and I also don't get to use ZoL, and because systemd is a very poor not-SMF, and because there is no FMA for Linux, and because epoll makes me sad, and so on and on. But I don't dwell on all the mistakes made by Sun's executives from 2000-2010 (and they made so many terrible mistakes), not often. Since that seems popular in this thread, I'll tell you what I think those mistakes were (some of which Oracle is still making): - clinging to dying business (SPARC, J2ME) to the point that other, better business was forgone to avoid cannibalizing / competing with the dying business - killing Sun PS (2002) - insisting on unacceptable-to-Google licensing terms for Solaris (2002) - suspending Solaris x86 development (2002) - selling Sun to Oracle There are more bad decisions, including buying MySQL (which was instantly forked, and that US$1bn price tag hurt). Oddly, the torch of OS innovation has passed to MSFT. Not so odd, really, when you realize that MSFT learned the lessons of stack ranking (don't do it). And MSFT already had learned the lesson that to survive disruptions you must pivot. Bryan clearly learned those lessons early, so I think he'll be fine.

foxhop 7y ago

That sucks really badly... Sad customer here.

brianwawok 7y ago
What was their win over AWS or GCE?
- e12e 7y ago
  Not a customer, but their main differentiator was co-locality of data and compute resources, leading to better utilization/lower communication overhead. The use of Solaris, their port of kvm etc were implementation details. Sorry to see them go, one of the few "cloud" providers that actually seemed to to some creative thinking on the architecture side.
  - Thaxll 7y ago
    Yeah how can you compete against AWS / x86 / Linux on that space not sure.
    - Annatar 7y ago
      With technology which is an order of magnitude more concerned with reliability and easier to use than any competition out there, that's how.
      - dijit 7y ago
        Apparently not.
        user5994461 7y ago
        There is nothing that can be an order of magnitude better than DO/AWS/GCE on multiple aspects.

tjfontaine 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
dymk 7y ago
> Joyeurs Please tell me this is a play on the word Voyeurs

joeblubaugh 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  If anyone's curious, some of that history was documented here: http://billturner.github.io/2014/02/28/whats-happened-to-textdrive/ http://billturner.github.io/2014/02/28/whats-happened-to-tex...
  - mzs 7y ago
    earlier context: https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/16/cloud-computing-company-joyent-leaves-early-supporters-out-in-the-cold/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/16/cloud-computing-company-jo...
  - eli 7y ago
    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.
imperialdrive 7y ago
If anyone reading this has less than 100 servers running with them, I am capable to handle turnkey documented migration in <60 days to a provider of your choice.

new_realist 7y ago

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

fragmede 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      Sure but how much is that market growing?
      - johannes1234321 7y ago
        As long as it is sustainable business it should be fine for companies in this domain.
  - dboreham 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

berns 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
Fun fact, in 2008 Joyent was Twitter’s host and asked them to leave.
- gbrown_ 7y ago
  Source? I've not heard that take and would be curious to read more about it.
  - randylahey 7y ago
    https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/31/twitter-and-joyent-split-amidst-downtime-travails/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/31/twitter-and-joyent-split-a...
    - saurik 7y ago
      This article makes it sound more like Twitter left the relationship because Joyent wasn't delivering on performance and stability.
  - davidpaulyoung 7y ago
    It's true.
    - velcrovan 7y ago
      I even wrote a little poem about it at the time: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/birds https://thelocalyarn.com/article/birds
- TimTheTinker 7y ago

TimTheTinker 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Good memories! https://davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-joyent/ https://davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-joy...
  - jmarneweck 7y ago
    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.
- jonathonf 7y ago
  Strongspace still exists and is still hosting the VC storage accounts which Joyent shed (or at least, I think so... parts of their site seem to be dead). ExpanDrive's "Cloud drive client software" is also well worth looking into.
anonymouz 7y ago
They'll forever remain on my mind for their rip-off "lifetime hosting". I paid a lot of money for it, and it was supposed to last while the company lasted. But then they were folded into Joyent and the lifetime deals discontinued (with just a little bit limited time hosting offered in compensation). I have stayed away from them forever since, and warned everybody I could about their terrible business practices.

skrebbel 7y ago

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.

noir_lord 7y ago
They where a company that was around when node took off, so they offered products and services around that. Last I heard Samsung had acquired them.
- traek 7y ago
  Joyent created Node.js
  - randylahey 7y ago
    Ryan Dahl created Node.js prior to being hired at Joyent, and then sold them the rights to it.
    - lurkertroll 7y ago
      He also created many great childrens books
    - httpsterio 7y ago
      The iojs debacle was because joyent had too much governance of the project and it was subsequently handed over to the board that currently governs nodejs. While the first Iines of what became nodejs weren't written by joyent, they can be quite reliably be credited to being the company that made it happen originally.

jpgvm 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

bovermyer 7y ago

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

jiveturkey 7y ago

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.

ericfrederich 7y ago

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.

saurik 7y ago

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 :(.

freezey00 7y ago

not sure anyone really even used this thing.

warp_factor 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

Nux 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- Nux 7y ago
  That's a nice bit of trivia! Had no idea Twitter started on Virtualmin at Joyent.

freezey00 7y ago

Did anyone actually even use that thing?

njyx 7y ago

Wow - brings back memories!

joyent 7y ago

I just hate their stupid shitty name. Joyent. What an awful fucking name. It's like the word you'd use to describe the sensation of injecting dish soap into your urethra.