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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

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.
      - tastroder 7y ago
        They recruited Dahl (and certainly contributed much through people like isaacs (npm, iirc he was at Joyent already) and more before he officially moved to Joyent) but if my memory of that time isn't all too blurry it certainly gained enough steam at that point to credit him as being the one kicking it off. It surely was the node we know today at that point (granted, with a much less enjoyable API surface). Not that this belittles their role, they certainly grew and provided a viable ecosystem for the large scale adoption that followed.
      - erichocean 7y ago
        > they can be quite reliably be credited to being the company that made it happen originally This is false, as someone who was actually there can attest. Node.js couldn't even run on Solaris when Joyent finally got involved, and Node.js technically and in terms of growth had already taken off thanks to Ryan Dahl. Source: I'm the guy that ported Node.js to Solaris, and I have nothing to do with Joyent, then or now.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
wmf 7y ago
Joyent has been a subsidiary of Samsung for a few years (presumably running Samsung's internal private cloud) and I guess they are now focusing almost entirely on Samsung and their public cloud was a distraction that didn't make much money.
- cyphar 7y ago
  Samsung acquired them because of their public cloud infrastructure -- they were Joyent customers for a long time and clearly decided that buying them would be the cheapest way to continue using them. As mentioned in TFA, they are only shutting down their multi-tenant cloud and are keeping their dedicated cloud business (which is what Samsung uses).
  - bdha 7y ago
    This origin story is not entirely accurate[0]. (I spent almost four years helping build datacenters for Samsung _Mobile_, who actually bought Joyent.) [0] https://github.com/joyent?q=manta https://github.com/joyent?q=manta
cookiecaper 7y ago
My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. They were acquired by Samsung in 2016-ish iirc. Solaris/illumos has failed to gain traction and the already-tiny community has only dwindled over the last few years with the expiry of OmniTI and other major illumos users. The death knell really being the abandonment of illumos-gate as the authoritative ZFS upstream. If old-school diehards like Matt Ahrens are throwing up their hands and saying that the momentum in ZFS is in ZoL, the battle is over IMO. node.js was always a diversion IMO. I think it was a play to maintain relevance, something Joyent has always acknowledged a need to do, but I don't think they've ever had the manpower or the buy-in to go full throttle. I don't know if this is the end of Joyent as such or not, but IMO it's finally time for Cantrill et al to turn in. They've undoubtedly fought the good fight, but illumos is a farce at this point. Better to accept that their old-school big Unix development model is a thing of the past and put those efforts to something more practically useful, like FreeBSD. At this point, they're torturing the legacy of Solaris more than maintaining it.
- masklinn 7y ago
  > My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. I man not really, Joyent is a hosting company (cloud & virtualisation). That's built upon an Illumos distribution (SmartOS) but SmartOS is not their business.
  - cookiecaper 7y ago
    I guess it needs clarification that I'm not trying to indicate they relied on proprietary hardware platforms like SPARC or a 1990s big-iron licensing model. These days, it's acknowledged that rent-seeking by a million cuts is the only viable way to make money. Even Microsoft is acknowledging that. SmartOS may've been indirectly implicated in revenue, but let's be real, illumos and Joyent have always been tied at the hip. Joyent was never going to become a Linux-centric alternative public cloud like AWS, GCloud, etc. If there had been less ideological fervor and with Samsung's backing, maybe they could've offered more serious competition to the incumbents, but the Solaris style oozes out of Joyent's every pore. It's fundamental to their way of thinking. That purity and commitment is certainly admirable, but it's simply not commercially viable anymore.
wolfspider 7y ago
Yes I'm interested to know if this affects what they were doing with VPC control plane for FreeBSD and the subsequent integration with Vagrant and VMWare.
- sean0- 7y ago
  The FreeBSD/VPC hypervisor efforts ran into a few “corporate speed bumps.” A few folks, myself included, are working to merge this code and make it generally available. The FreeBSD hypervisor effort certainly was the best systems work I’ve seen in my life, especially in such a short amount of time and given the resources at our disposal. My favorite anecdote was that the internal first-pass review of the benchmark data was that we had cheated because we had “exceeded the laws of computer science physics” when we saturated 100GE with VXLAN encap’ed guest traffic with no hardware acceleration, and we were only using a half a CPU core. If someone asked me to do this type of work again I’d use FreeBSD as the base again in a heartbeat. Good systems engineers are invaluable. Working from a solid technical foundation is equally critical, so is the community. The control plane work likely won’t be made available (it was Linux specific, anyway). :-/ As for both the FreeBSD work and control plane work, it was good times, good memories, and a great team while it lasted.
  - X-Istence 7y ago
    Are there any blog posts/email threads you'd point people to if they want to read more about the work that was done? I'd love to see and read about some of the things you ran into, and how you accomplished some of those high speed transfers.
    - sean0- 7y ago
      The best talk I gave on this wasn’t recorded (and had another section on the details of the new MBUF struct that mmacy came up with), but here are a few pointers for the time being: https://youtu.be/La4ekkKbM5o https://youtu.be/La4ekkKbM5o https://github.com/joyent/freebsd/tree/projects/VPC https://github.com/joyent/freebsd/tree/projects/VPC https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/SeanChittenden/freebsd-vpc-introduction https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/SeanChittenden/freebsd-vpc...
cbsmith 7y ago
Joyent was a public cloud provider, that offered a VPS/Container style offering built on Illuminos (open source Solaris). The expanded into offering Linux using some clever stuff to support Linux runtime on Solaris (kind of like WINE, but much simpler since Linux is much more similar to Solaris and also fully open source). All with DTrace so you had some great transparency on what was going on with the underlying hardware.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  > Joyent was a public cloud provider, that offered a VPS/Container style offering built on Illuminos (open source Solaris). When they first started they used FreeBSD jails IIRC. The main selling point is/was being closer to the hardware and thus getting better hardware utilization. Virtualizing at the machine level was a lot slower (especially before Intel VT-x and AMD-V came along) and so one wouldn't lose (say) 30% right off the top: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation
  - cbsmith 7y ago
    > When they first started they used FreeBSD jails IIRC. Nope. Solaris Zones.
    - jen20 7y ago
      Incorrect. FreeBSD was in use first, as founder David Young’s own history [1] describes. OpenSolaris and zones came later. [1]: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-joyent/amp/ https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17...
      - cbsmith 7y ago
        Hrm.. I don't even remember them having a BSD jailed offering, but I'll take your evidence over my lack of evidence.
- bogomipz 7y ago
jlarocco 7y ago
> But oh, they're cancelling the public cloud, which I assume was the hosting service? Public cloud != Private cloud It looks like at the very least they still offer private "cloud" hosting.
throw0101a 7y ago
> My understanding always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. The main selling point is/was being closer to the hardware and thus getting better utilization. Virtualizing at the machine level was a lot slower (especially before Intel VT-x and AMD-V came along) and so one wouldn't lose (say) 30% right off the top: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation
- jaytaylor 7y ago
  In this case, do clouds with physical bare-metal provisioning capabilities like EC2 / GCP / Azure / OCI kill the Joyent value proposition?
  - jen20 7y ago
    Not really - since the bare metal provisioning tends only to be large, expensive instance types. The benefit of secure OS-level virtualisation is that you can co-locate the smaller workloads of multiple tenants on the same bare metal, while not incurring the overhead of hardware virtualisation. When you compared the utility of JCP "tiny" instance (1 CPU worth of shares, 256MB of RAM) to a t2.micro or similar instance in AWS, the difference was astounding. Part of this is the CPU credit mechanism on T2 instances, but I'd wager that a good part of it was being in OS-level virtualisation.
  - cookiecaper 7y ago
    Docker killed the value proposition. "Worse is better". FreeBSD's jails and illumos's zones have always been far, far superior technically, providing actual kernel encapsulation and coherent administration utilities, but Docker had the triple combination of the familiarity of Linux, the cute whale, and the bonfire of VC dollars to drive adoption. There is still a great deal of administrative/technical value in using anything-but-Docker if you can tolerate the social stigma, but who can? The CxOs need that Docker/Kubernetes feather in their cap so they can look cool at conferences. Suggesting SmartOS/illumos gets you sideways looks at the very bare minimum. When I stated that I was thinking about using it here over a year ago, my inbox was immediately flooded with accusations that I was part of a Joyent-bankrolled cabal, because clearly no sane ordinary person would consider such a dead platform. In the interim, OmniTI has gone belly-up and OpenZFS has deemed ZFS on Linux the rightful heir to the ZFS throne, and now the Joyent Public Cloud is shuttering. If the impression that you had to be part of a conspiracy to use SmartOS for a greenfield project was reasonable then, it's only more reasonable now. The sun may yet rise again on illumos some day, but it's time to accept that it's well into the night now.
rsync 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." Here is an old, historical thread that gives some context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669 I have a hazy recollection of their being part of the "free thumper" startup program that Sun Microsystems offered, briefly, and then later, blowing up one of those thumpers and losing a whole clouds worth of data... here it is: https://adtmag.com/articles/2008/01/21/strongspaces-10day-crash-highlights-web-storage-risks.aspx https://adtmag.com/articles/2008/01/21/strongspaces-10day-cr... Later, they were briefly (in)famous for voiding everyones lifetime shared hosting agreements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextDrive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextDrive "Customer backlash to the announcement turned out to be fierce."
- craz8 7y ago
  The lifetime hosting was clearly never going to work. Even when they launched it, anyone with any sense - and me - knew it. But it got them cash and publicity, and didn’t kill them when they cancelled it, so, on balance, it made their business possible
SwellJoe 7y ago
Technically speaking, they were quite far ahead of the curve. While VMs were all the rage, they were shipping container-based products (their Sun refugees kept developing Solaris Zones and ZFS in this context). The technical abilities of the Joyent folks were well beyond just about anybody else for a long time. One could argue they were too early. For several years they had the technology to beat Amazon, until Amazon's massive scale washed over the whole market. The founders did well, so it's not like they "lost", but it's kinda sad to see a technically visionary set of products reach a dead end (one could maybe even view this as the final commercial death of what Sun built). Also worth noting, their stack is open source in ways that nobody else is, I think. Maybe Google is doing right with Kubernetes, but everybody else is consuming OSS software to build proprietary clouds and giving basically nothing back. Joyent were doing most of the work, and giving most of the tech away.
- kbenson 7y ago
  > it's kinda sad to see a technically visionary set of products reach a dead end (one could maybe even view this as the final commercial death of what Sun built). I think it's not really the end of the technology, but it is an end to a generally available public commercial offering of it. It sounds like they're still offering services, but only for "single-tenant", which after some careful reading (because I wasn't sure how to interpret that initially), I think means that they'll provide their software and managemest system for private install for large orgs in their private deployments, maybe along with a support/management contract?
  - SwellJoe 7y ago
    That's basically putting technology out to pasture. When you've got a handful of large corporate customers that depend on a product, you can continue to extract money out of them for years or decades without the product having a future.
    - kbenson 7y ago
      The question is whether they are still actively pursuing enterprise clients. If they aren't, then I agree. If they are, then it's not putting it out to pasture, it's just a different business model. There are plenty of companies that do this. My brother works for one that does it for large network storage deployments using proprietary technology, and I imagine they don't want to hear from you unless you are willing to put out hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on a deployment (and yet they still have new deployments). I definitely wouldn't consider them putting the technology out to pasture because of that.
emmelaich 7y ago
From the announcement, they still offer > .... Fully-Managed Private Cloud, Managed Hardware Private Cloud, and On-Premise Private Cloud If you look into their docs, it's a layer above components such as Docker, VMs, cloud hardware, even Openstack.
aquaphile 7y ago
We were hosting customers of Joyent in 2006-2008. They were fantastic. I remember having a technical issue and talking directly to the CTO, who was most helpful. Before AWS launched, Joyent (in my opinion) had one of the best hosting services. We ran everything on them, and especially liked Zones as a feature. Separately, no one has mentioned that Joyent also had a full web application framework at one time (mail, calendar, etc.) that competed with the nascent Google GMail offerings. Joyent EOL'd back around 2010 if I recall correctly, but technically it was an impressive accomplishment.
ahartmetz 7y ago
Looks like they copied Sun's business plan. Nobody including Sun knew how Sun was going to make money after the decline of their hardware business.

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.
    - tastroder 7y ago
      They recruited Dahl (and certainly contributed much through people like isaacs (npm, iirc he was at Joyent already) and more before he officially moved to Joyent) but if my memory of that time isn't all too blurry it certainly gained enough steam at that point to credit him as being the one kicking it off. It surely was the node we know today at that point (granted, with a much less enjoyable API surface). Not that this belittles their role, they certainly grew and provided a viable ecosystem for the large scale adoption that followed.
    - erichocean 7y ago
      > they can be quite reliably be credited to being the company that made it happen originally This is false, as someone who was actually there can attest. Node.js couldn't even run on Solaris when Joyent finally got involved, and Node.js technically and in terms of growth had already taken off thanks to Ryan Dahl. Source: I'm the guy that ported Node.js to Solaris, and I have nothing to do with Joyent, then or now.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

wmf 7y ago

Joyent has been a subsidiary of Samsung for a few years (presumably running Samsung's internal private cloud) and I guess they are now focusing almost entirely on Samsung and their public cloud was a distraction that didn't make much money.

cyphar 7y ago
Samsung acquired them because of their public cloud infrastructure -- they were Joyent customers for a long time and clearly decided that buying them would be the cheapest way to continue using them. As mentioned in TFA, they are only shutting down their multi-tenant cloud and are keeping their dedicated cloud business (which is what Samsung uses).
- bdha 7y ago
  This origin story is not entirely accurate[0]. (I spent almost four years helping build datacenters for Samsung _Mobile_, who actually bought Joyent.) [0] https://github.com/joyent?q=manta https://github.com/joyent?q=manta

cookiecaper 7y ago

My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. They were acquired by Samsung in 2016-ish iirc. Solaris/illumos has failed to gain traction and the already-tiny community has only dwindled over the last few years with the expiry of OmniTI and other major illumos users. The death knell really being the abandonment of illumos-gate as the authoritative ZFS upstream. If old-school diehards like Matt Ahrens are throwing up their hands and saying that the momentum in ZFS is in ZoL, the battle is over IMO. node.js was always a diversion IMO. I think it was a play to maintain relevance, something Joyent has always acknowledged a need to do, but I don't think they've ever had the manpower or the buy-in to go full throttle. I don't know if this is the end of Joyent as such or not, but IMO it's finally time for Cantrill et al to turn in. They've undoubtedly fought the good fight, but illumos is a farce at this point. Better to accept that their old-school big Unix development model is a thing of the past and put those efforts to something more practically useful, like FreeBSD. At this point, they're torturing the legacy of Solaris more than maintaining it.

masklinn 7y ago
> My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees who've attempted to compete in the same OS/server space that Solaris operated upon way back when. I man not really, Joyent is a hosting company (cloud & virtualisation). That's built upon an Illumos distribution (SmartOS) but SmartOS is not their business.
- cookiecaper 7y ago
  I guess it needs clarification that I'm not trying to indicate they relied on proprietary hardware platforms like SPARC or a 1990s big-iron licensing model. These days, it's acknowledged that rent-seeking by a million cuts is the only viable way to make money. Even Microsoft is acknowledging that. SmartOS may've been indirectly implicated in revenue, but let's be real, illumos and Joyent have always been tied at the hip. Joyent was never going to become a Linux-centric alternative public cloud like AWS, GCloud, etc. If there had been less ideological fervor and with Samsung's backing, maybe they could've offered more serious competition to the incumbents, but the Solaris style oozes out of Joyent's every pore. It's fundamental to their way of thinking. That purity and commitment is certainly admirable, but it's simply not commercially viable anymore.

wolfspider 7y ago

Yes I'm interested to know if this affects what they were doing with VPC control plane for FreeBSD and the subsequent integration with Vagrant and VMWare.

sean0- 7y ago
The FreeBSD/VPC hypervisor efforts ran into a few “corporate speed bumps.” A few folks, myself included, are working to merge this code and make it generally available. The FreeBSD hypervisor effort certainly was the best systems work I’ve seen in my life, especially in such a short amount of time and given the resources at our disposal. My favorite anecdote was that the internal first-pass review of the benchmark data was that we had cheated because we had “exceeded the laws of computer science physics” when we saturated 100GE with VXLAN encap’ed guest traffic with no hardware acceleration, and we were only using a half a CPU core. If someone asked me to do this type of work again I’d use FreeBSD as the base again in a heartbeat. Good systems engineers are invaluable. Working from a solid technical foundation is equally critical, so is the community. The control plane work likely won’t be made available (it was Linux specific, anyway). :-/ As for both the FreeBSD work and control plane work, it was good times, good memories, and a great team while it lasted.
- X-Istence 7y ago
  Are there any blog posts/email threads you'd point people to if they want to read more about the work that was done? I'd love to see and read about some of the things you ran into, and how you accomplished some of those high speed transfers.
  - sean0- 7y ago
    The best talk I gave on this wasn’t recorded (and had another section on the details of the new MBUF struct that mmacy came up with), but here are a few pointers for the time being: https://youtu.be/La4ekkKbM5o https://youtu.be/La4ekkKbM5o https://github.com/joyent/freebsd/tree/projects/VPC https://github.com/joyent/freebsd/tree/projects/VPC https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/SeanChittenden/freebsd-vpc-introduction https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/SeanChittenden/freebsd-vpc...

cbsmith 7y ago

Joyent was a public cloud provider, that offered a VPS/Container style offering built on Illuminos (open source Solaris). The expanded into offering Linux using some clever stuff to support Linux runtime on Solaris (kind of like WINE, but much simpler since Linux is much more similar to Solaris and also fully open source). All with DTrace so you had some great transparency on what was going on with the underlying hardware.

throw0101a 7y ago
> Joyent was a public cloud provider, that offered a VPS/Container style offering built on Illuminos (open source Solaris). When they first started they used FreeBSD jails IIRC. The main selling point is/was being closer to the hardware and thus getting better hardware utilization. Virtualizing at the machine level was a lot slower (especially before Intel VT-x and AMD-V came along) and so one wouldn't lose (say) 30% right off the top: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation
- cbsmith 7y ago
  > When they first started they used FreeBSD jails IIRC. Nope. Solaris Zones.
  - jen20 7y ago
    Incorrect. FreeBSD was in use first, as founder David Young’s own history [1] describes. OpenSolaris and zones came later. [1]: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17/a-brief-history-of-joyent/amp/ https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/davidpaulyoung.com/2016/06/17...
    - cbsmith 7y ago
      Hrm.. I don't even remember them having a BSD jailed offering, but I'll take your evidence over my lack of evidence.
bogomipz 7y ago

jlarocco 7y ago

> But oh, they're cancelling the public cloud, which I assume was the hosting service? Public cloud != Private cloud It looks like at the very least they still offer private "cloud" hosting.

throw0101a 7y ago

> My understanding always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. The main selling point is/was being closer to the hardware and thus getting better utilization. Virtualizing at the machine level was a lot slower (especially before Intel VT-x and AMD-V came along) and so one wouldn't lose (say) 30% right off the top: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-level_virtualisation

jaytaylor 7y ago
In this case, do clouds with physical bare-metal provisioning capabilities like EC2 / GCP / Azure / OCI kill the Joyent value proposition?
- jen20 7y ago
  Not really - since the bare metal provisioning tends only to be large, expensive instance types. The benefit of secure OS-level virtualisation is that you can co-locate the smaller workloads of multiple tenants on the same bare metal, while not incurring the overhead of hardware virtualisation. When you compared the utility of JCP "tiny" instance (1 CPU worth of shares, 256MB of RAM) to a t2.micro or similar instance in AWS, the difference was astounding. Part of this is the CPU credit mechanism on T2 instances, but I'd wager that a good part of it was being in OS-level virtualisation.
- cookiecaper 7y ago
  Docker killed the value proposition. "Worse is better". FreeBSD's jails and illumos's zones have always been far, far superior technically, providing actual kernel encapsulation and coherent administration utilities, but Docker had the triple combination of the familiarity of Linux, the cute whale, and the bonfire of VC dollars to drive adoption. There is still a great deal of administrative/technical value in using anything-but-Docker if you can tolerate the social stigma, but who can? The CxOs need that Docker/Kubernetes feather in their cap so they can look cool at conferences. Suggesting SmartOS/illumos gets you sideways looks at the very bare minimum. When I stated that I was thinking about using it here over a year ago, my inbox was immediately flooded with accusations that I was part of a Joyent-bankrolled cabal, because clearly no sane ordinary person would consider such a dead platform. In the interim, OmniTI has gone belly-up and OpenZFS has deemed ZFS on Linux the rightful heir to the ZFS throne, and now the Joyent Public Cloud is shuttering. If the impression that you had to be part of a conspiracy to use SmartOS for a greenfield project was reasonable then, it's only more reasonable now. The sun may yet rise again on illumos some day, but it's time to accept that it's well into the night now.

rsync 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." Here is an old, historical thread that gives some context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669 I have a hazy recollection of their being part of the "free thumper" startup program that Sun Microsystems offered, briefly, and then later, blowing up one of those thumpers and losing a whole clouds worth of data... here it is: https://adtmag.com/articles/2008/01/21/strongspaces-10day-crash-highlights-web-storage-risks.aspx https://adtmag.com/articles/2008/01/21/strongspaces-10day-cr... Later, they were briefly (in)famous for voiding everyones lifetime shared hosting agreements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextDrive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextDrive "Customer backlash to the announcement turned out to be fierce."

craz8 7y ago
The lifetime hosting was clearly never going to work. Even when they launched it, anyone with any sense - and me - knew it. But it got them cash and publicity, and didn’t kill them when they cancelled it, so, on balance, it made their business possible

SwellJoe 7y ago

Technically speaking, they were quite far ahead of the curve. While VMs were all the rage, they were shipping container-based products (their Sun refugees kept developing Solaris Zones and ZFS in this context). The technical abilities of the Joyent folks were well beyond just about anybody else for a long time. One could argue they were too early. For several years they had the technology to beat Amazon, until Amazon's massive scale washed over the whole market. The founders did well, so it's not like they "lost", but it's kinda sad to see a technically visionary set of products reach a dead end (one could maybe even view this as the final commercial death of what Sun built). Also worth noting, their stack is open source in ways that nobody else is, I think. Maybe Google is doing right with Kubernetes, but everybody else is consuming OSS software to build proprietary clouds and giving basically nothing back. Joyent were doing most of the work, and giving most of the tech away.

kbenson 7y ago
> it's kinda sad to see a technically visionary set of products reach a dead end (one could maybe even view this as the final commercial death of what Sun built). I think it's not really the end of the technology, but it is an end to a generally available public commercial offering of it. It sounds like they're still offering services, but only for "single-tenant", which after some careful reading (because I wasn't sure how to interpret that initially), I think means that they'll provide their software and managemest system for private install for large orgs in their private deployments, maybe along with a support/management contract?
- SwellJoe 7y ago
  That's basically putting technology out to pasture. When you've got a handful of large corporate customers that depend on a product, you can continue to extract money out of them for years or decades without the product having a future.
  - kbenson 7y ago
    The question is whether they are still actively pursuing enterprise clients. If they aren't, then I agree. If they are, then it's not putting it out to pasture, it's just a different business model. There are plenty of companies that do this. My brother works for one that does it for large network storage deployments using proprietary technology, and I imagine they don't want to hear from you unless you are willing to put out hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on a deployment (and yet they still have new deployments). I definitely wouldn't consider them putting the technology out to pasture because of that.

emmelaich 7y ago

From the announcement, they still offer > .... Fully-Managed Private Cloud, Managed Hardware Private Cloud, and On-Premise Private Cloud If you look into their docs, it's a layer above components such as Docker, VMs, cloud hardware, even Openstack.

aquaphile 7y ago

We were hosting customers of Joyent in 2006-2008. They were fantastic. I remember having a technical issue and talking directly to the CTO, who was most helpful. Before AWS launched, Joyent (in my opinion) had one of the best hosting services. We ran everything on them, and especially liked Zones as a feature. Separately, no one has mentioned that Joyent also had a full web application framework at one time (mail, calendar, etc.) that competed with the nascent Google GMail offerings. Joyent EOL'd back around 2010 if I recall correctly, but technically it was an impressive accomplishment.

ahartmetz 7y ago

Looks like they copied Sun's business plan. Nobody including Sun knew how Sun was going to make money after the decline of their hardware business.