5 ms·

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. T

by 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.
    - cryptonector 7y ago
      Eh, killing OpenSolaris was done by Oracle. While that was a side-effect of Oracle acquiring Sun, it's still on Oracle, so I won't apportion blame for that one on Sun execs. The death of MySQL is certainly a good thing, but it's not really dead. People use it still. SPARC was a dead end. I too wish Bryan well. And the rest of the Sun diaspora. I miss them!
bcantrill 7y ago
I don't know that I had personalized it quite that deeply, but it's certainly an end of an era for us and for our public cloud customers. The technology is alive and well, and being used more broadly than ever for on-premises infrastructure. In that regard, the costs of the public cloud are less in the technology, and more in the surround of support, billing, etc. Certainly, the (significant) work that we had to do for CPU vulnerability mitigation needed to be done for our on-prem customers as well...
- protomyth 7y ago
  Will this affect Triton SmartOS?

by 60sec 7y ago

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.
  - cryptonector 7y ago
    Eh, killing OpenSolaris was done by Oracle. While that was a side-effect of Oracle acquiring Sun, it's still on Oracle, so I won't apportion blame for that one on Sun execs. The death of MySQL is certainly a good thing, but it's not really dead. People use it still. SPARC was a dead end. I too wish Bryan well. And the rest of the Sun diaspora. I miss them!

bcantrill 7y ago

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

protomyth 7y ago
Will this affect Triton SmartOS?