4 ms·

> they did use plain cgroups and Linux kernel features from what I remember. Technically just Linux namespaces and seccomp. Those are the parts important for s

> they did use plain cgroups and Linux kernel features from what I remember. Technically just Linux namespaces and seccomp. Those are the parts important for security. cgroups are more about enforcing resource limits, which Sandstorm never got around to (but planned to, eventually). > I'm not even sure what the business model of Sandstorm was We had basically two plans, and the problem is we didn't consistently follow one of them: Plan A: Make technology that excites people, especially developers, and shows fast growth and adoption. Sell investors on a long-term vision of an app store and such -- but get them to fund a big Series A pre-revenue that would allow us to develop for many years. Plan B: Sell a product to organizations (enterprise, government, etc.) that, for policy and/or compliance reasons, could not use cloud apps. There are still a lot of these! Plan A is really what we needed to stay focused on, and what our team really understood how to execute. We were actually totally succeeding at growing the developer community! But Plan B was enticing because it seemed like a faster path to revenue, and it felt like showing revenue would make our pitch even stronger. But we had no idea how to actually execute on Plan B, how to sell to those kinds of organizations. So our efforts there totally flopped. And when investors saw us fall on our faces they weren't excited to keep investing. All that is to say, I don't think it's the idea that failed, I think we failed in the execution. I had intended to keep working on Sandstorm on the side as an open source project when I joined Cloudflare, but then my work there (Cloudflare Workers) was successful, and, well, it's a lot more fun to work on something that is succeeding, so I gave up on Sandstorm.

indigodaddy 2y ago
It was fun while it lasted. Perhaps it can be revived/reinvented etc..
chubot 2y ago
Interesting, thanks for the response! I guess my argument is that there are products that people want, that aren't financially viable under the current model I think Plan A is evidence of that -- investors want to fund hockey stick growth, because they want one win to pay for 99 losses But that shouldn't be the only way to grow a company, and retain skilled engineers. You may be right that it would have been the best strategy at the time, given the flood of investment money into tech. --- Some kind of "bootstrapped" path sounds more appealing and sustainble to me, and perhaps more likely to lead to a high quality product (or at least I don't think it would lead to an inferior product) That's what Plan B sounds like. I am not sure that a cloud OS designed to be self-hosted is ever going to make revenue justified by Plan A (though I'd be happy to hear an argument otherwise!) That is, there's the question of what happens if Plan A succeeds, and the company don't find revenue. I guess that's sort of what happened to Docker -- the company shrunk, and lost a bunch of people. Some people may see that as a net positive outcome, but it seems a bit inefficient to me. And I think better tech could have won there ... i.e. it's not clear that the tech that got a lot of VC investment is the one that we should be using I see a similar dynamic with say Github Actions -- they give a ton of computing resources for free, because it's subsidized. But that actually prevents better companies from forming!
- kentonv 2y ago
  I don't realistically think there's a "bootstrapped" path to build what Sandstorm was building. Too many pieces needed to be in place before it was a really viable product. After a dozen or so eng-years we still had something that was pretty janky. Moreover trying to take a bootstrapped path creates a distraction from the core technology by forcing you to design for ways you can sell more quickly. That might require shortcuts and compromises, or building things that you don't actually need in the long term. That was certainly the case for us: we spent a lot of time engineering a way to paywall certain "enterprise features", and building a paid hosting service (which was sort of antithetical to the whole idea), and we made compromises in the security model to allow us to move faster. I think it's just a fact that most businesses require upfront capital to get off the ground, and some require a lot of it. So you either need founders who are already independently wealthy or you need some sort of venture capital. And yeah sometimes you have a Docker who makes a great piece of technology and can't figure out how to sell it, but would Docker have been built at all otherwise? Maybe it was a loss for the shareholders but it still seems like a win for the industry.

indigodaddy 2y ago

It was fun while it lasted. Perhaps it can be revived/reinvented etc..

chubot 2y ago

Interesting, thanks for the response! I guess my argument is that there are products that people want, that aren't financially viable under the current model I think Plan A is evidence of that -- investors want to fund hockey stick growth, because they want one win to pay for 99 losses But that shouldn't be the only way to grow a company, and retain skilled engineers. You may be right that it would have been the best strategy at the time, given the flood of investment money into tech. --- Some kind of "bootstrapped" path sounds more appealing and sustainble to me, and perhaps more likely to lead to a high quality product (or at least I don't think it would lead to an inferior product) That's what Plan B sounds like. I am not sure that a cloud OS designed to be self-hosted is ever going to make revenue justified by Plan A (though I'd be happy to hear an argument otherwise!) That is, there's the question of what happens if Plan A succeeds, and the company don't find revenue. I guess that's sort of what happened to Docker -- the company shrunk, and lost a bunch of people. Some people may see that as a net positive outcome, but it seems a bit inefficient to me. And I think better tech could have won there ... i.e. it's not clear that the tech that got a lot of VC investment is the one that we should be using I see a similar dynamic with say Github Actions -- they give a ton of computing resources for free, because it's subsidized. But that actually prevents better companies from forming!

kentonv 2y ago
I don't realistically think there's a "bootstrapped" path to build what Sandstorm was building. Too many pieces needed to be in place before it was a really viable product. After a dozen or so eng-years we still had something that was pretty janky. Moreover trying to take a bootstrapped path creates a distraction from the core technology by forcing you to design for ways you can sell more quickly. That might require shortcuts and compromises, or building things that you don't actually need in the long term. That was certainly the case for us: we spent a lot of time engineering a way to paywall certain "enterprise features", and building a paid hosting service (which was sort of antithetical to the whole idea), and we made compromises in the security model to allow us to move faster. I think it's just a fact that most businesses require upfront capital to get off the ground, and some require a lot of it. So you either need founders who are already independently wealthy or you need some sort of venture capital. And yeah sometimes you have a Docker who makes a great piece of technology and can't figure out how to sell it, but would Docker have been built at all otherwise? Maybe it was a loss for the shareholders but it still seems like a win for the industry.