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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

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.
      - Annatar 7y ago
        Apart from this entry I don't see any discussion on what Sun did wrong, but since you broached the subject: - I'm furious about all the attention RISC V undeservedly gets while OpenSPARC is vastly superior in terms of mnemonics and virtual register windows and a free instruction every branch not taken and is GPL licensed; - not devoting enough attention to i86pc Solaris was a major mistake; - not selling cheap fully Solaris integrated desktops was the death knell: people knew Solaris from their student days, and universities had it because Sun made and sold workstations; once Sun decided to stop that, talent acquisition was stopped: desktop is needed for OS adoption; - UltraSPARC T3 and T5 are blazingly fast, I know because I ran them, but now it seems too late; - it wouldn't be too late if the RISC V nonsense pandering stopped and some OpenSPARC designed servers and workstations and even tinkertoys showed up by enthusiasts, like they did with Raspberry Pi; - I'm glad Sun bought MySQL because Oracle subsequently destroyed it; MySQL is nowhere to be found now, and that is good so, because it was a shitty database which silently corrupts data; it deserved never to be made in the first place; that is one good deed in the world of damage which Oracle caused; - killing OpenSolaris destroyed all that good will; had the project continued, it would have directly competed with GNU/Linux because we saw a constant monthly influx of GNU/Linux refugees on opensolaris.org forum, people who actually needed to get things done with their hardware; - biggest mistake was that UltraSPARC based servers weren't cheaper than an average intel personal computer tin bucket server. That really killed them. And they would argue and refer me, a customer, to their internal "pricing committee" instead of listening. What happens when a business doesn't listen to its customers? "Bryan clearly learned those lessons early, so I think he'll be fine." Indeed, and I wish him well and much success. He truly deserves by his deeds let alone his thoughts to continue being successful.
- hosh 7y ago
  Might be better to ask this on Quora. Maybe someone not bound by an NDA will answer. On the other hand, the single-tenant customer is plausible. I know Samsung invested in a lot of technology in the past five years. The Viv team is still around (acquired around the same time as Joyent), and there is quite a bit of IoT Samsung is building into their appliances.
- user5994461 7y ago
  Let me give you some hearsay then from working in both megacorps and hosting. Running a public cloud requires a massive amount of people, unlike what you seem to think. It takes one or two orders of magnitude more work to do anything public rather than internal. Bet there is no resource and no budget to keep running their public cloud anymore. It's a small company, don't have unlimited resources. Second, there are no revenues, no future and no clients on their public cloud. Solaris for all intent and purpose is dead (it pains me to say that but that's a fact). What companies run Solaris in this decade? None. Plus hosting competition is at an all time high, DigitalOcean and other on the cheap side, AWS and Google on the enterprise side. Samsung is a massive company and all massive companies have massive internal systems and need for internal infrastructure. I bet there is plenty of work that needs to be done internally that is much more valuable than public cloud. There they go. If you've worked in any F50, you would know that the sheer amount of servers and desktops is larger than an AWS datacenter. They are all cloud hosting, internal or external, whether that's their main business or not.
  - nixgeek 7y ago
    Amount of servers? Not sure. Reasonable speculation suggests us-east-1 to be over one million physical servers at this point, based on Hamilton’s talk about AZ design and scale at re:Invent a couple years ago and their IPv4 consumption rate across AWS. I don’t imagine your average Fortune 50 has millions of servers.
    - user5994461 7y ago
      The talks a few years ago put a datacenter around 60k servers. us-east-1 region has multiple availability zones that each has multiple datacenters (both more so than the typical region because it's the largest one). Consider that a Fortune 50 has hundreds of thousands of employees. With one desktop per employee that's already way more hardware to manage than an AWS datacenter. Now think of how many servers, mobile devices, network gear, access points there are to run the business. 60k servers is not uncommon. A million devices is nothing special.

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.
    - Annatar 7y ago
      Apart from this entry I don't see any discussion on what Sun did wrong, but since you broached the subject: - I'm furious about all the attention RISC V undeservedly gets while OpenSPARC is vastly superior in terms of mnemonics and virtual register windows and a free instruction every branch not taken and is GPL licensed; - not devoting enough attention to i86pc Solaris was a major mistake; - not selling cheap fully Solaris integrated desktops was the death knell: people knew Solaris from their student days, and universities had it because Sun made and sold workstations; once Sun decided to stop that, talent acquisition was stopped: desktop is needed for OS adoption; - UltraSPARC T3 and T5 are blazingly fast, I know because I ran them, but now it seems too late; - it wouldn't be too late if the RISC V nonsense pandering stopped and some OpenSPARC designed servers and workstations and even tinkertoys showed up by enthusiasts, like they did with Raspberry Pi; - I'm glad Sun bought MySQL because Oracle subsequently destroyed it; MySQL is nowhere to be found now, and that is good so, because it was a shitty database which silently corrupts data; it deserved never to be made in the first place; that is one good deed in the world of damage which Oracle caused; - killing OpenSolaris destroyed all that good will; had the project continued, it would have directly competed with GNU/Linux because we saw a constant monthly influx of GNU/Linux refugees on opensolaris.org forum, people who actually needed to get things done with their hardware; - biggest mistake was that UltraSPARC based servers weren't cheaper than an average intel personal computer tin bucket server. That really killed them. And they would argue and refer me, a customer, to their internal "pricing committee" instead of listening. What happens when a business doesn't listen to its customers? "Bryan clearly learned those lessons early, so I think he'll be fine." Indeed, and I wish him well and much success. He truly deserves by his deeds let alone his thoughts to continue being successful.
hosh 7y ago
Might be better to ask this on Quora. Maybe someone not bound by an NDA will answer. On the other hand, the single-tenant customer is plausible. I know Samsung invested in a lot of technology in the past five years. The Viv team is still around (acquired around the same time as Joyent), and there is quite a bit of IoT Samsung is building into their appliances.
user5994461 7y ago
Let me give you some hearsay then from working in both megacorps and hosting. Running a public cloud requires a massive amount of people, unlike what you seem to think. It takes one or two orders of magnitude more work to do anything public rather than internal. Bet there is no resource and no budget to keep running their public cloud anymore. It's a small company, don't have unlimited resources. Second, there are no revenues, no future and no clients on their public cloud. Solaris for all intent and purpose is dead (it pains me to say that but that's a fact). What companies run Solaris in this decade? None. Plus hosting competition is at an all time high, DigitalOcean and other on the cheap side, AWS and Google on the enterprise side. Samsung is a massive company and all massive companies have massive internal systems and need for internal infrastructure. I bet there is plenty of work that needs to be done internally that is much more valuable than public cloud. There they go. If you've worked in any F50, you would know that the sheer amount of servers and desktops is larger than an AWS datacenter. They are all cloud hosting, internal or external, whether that's their main business or not.
- nixgeek 7y ago
  Amount of servers? Not sure. Reasonable speculation suggests us-east-1 to be over one million physical servers at this point, based on Hamilton’s talk about AZ design and scale at re:Invent a couple years ago and their IPv4 consumption rate across AWS. I don’t imagine your average Fortune 50 has millions of servers.
  - user5994461 7y ago
    The talks a few years ago put a datacenter around 60k servers. us-east-1 region has multiple availability zones that each has multiple datacenters (both more so than the typical region because it's the largest one). Consider that a Fortune 50 has hundreds of thousands of employees. With one desktop per employee that's already way more hardware to manage than an AWS datacenter. Now think of how many servers, mobile devices, network gear, access points there are to run the business. 60k servers is not uncommon. A million devices is nothing special.