Samsung Acquires Joyent

https://www.joyent.com/blog/samsung-acquires-joyent-a-ctos-perspective

by yunong • 10 years ago

787 236 10 years ago

ethbro4• 10 years ago

So this is the moment where everyone with a sufficient device / install marketshare decides they need to buy cloud expertise?

"Samsung will immediately benefit from having direct access to Joyent’s technology, leadership and talent. Likewise, Joyent will be able to take advantage of Samsung’s scale of business, global footprint, financial muscle and its brand power."

smt883• 10 years ago

Samsung is (and has been) terrified that their handset business will be slaughtered in the race to the bottom of the hardware industry. They tried to create their own OS to give themselves an edge over other Android manufacturers.

Their fears have come true (and now it's even happening to Apple). Hardware is an incredibly difficult, risky business, and differentiation is now in the services/software arena. That's why Samsung, in particular, needs this acquisition (and others like it).

ethbro4• 10 years ago

One thing that I never understood was how the Android hardware ecosystem never saw contributing resources to developing more efficiently abstracted core Linux + Android support for their hardware compatibility challenges as a competitive advantage.

Disclaimer: I'm not involved in that space, so maybe they've started?

tracker14• 10 years ago

Samsung is in a good position to utilize Joyent in Asian markets, better than most cloud providers, and given the "smart" features of most of their devices, and how much they probably feel they're leaving money on the table compared to even Android's Play Store, it makes sense... doesn't mean it'll work... but even if it only applies to Asia and Africa, where they leave the more firm Android in place elsewhere, it could be a significant boost.

I don't expect to see Samsung take on GCE, Azure or AWS directly though... and would be really unsure if I were a Joyent customer right now.

brotherjerky• 10 years ago

So the biggest phone manufacturer now owns a lot of Node.js expertise. Hopefully that leads to more JS in mobile!

wvenable• 10 years ago

I had a friend ask why the Oneplus one 3 could possibly need 6GB of RAM. Thank you for providing a possible answer! :)

tracker14• 10 years ago

Well, buffering 4K video, while running other active services in the background... finally broke down and installed FB messenger again, and it's definitely better, but there are a lot of consistent apps that tend to be very bloated as it is.

Given how well React Native tends to work, and I have to be honest, I like the ecosystem structure better than most apps I've worked on in general, I can see it actually working out better in many cases.

jankassens• 10 years ago

They're definitely doing research for efficient JS on low end devices:

- AOT compilation for a subset of JS: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-13...

- "A JavaScript engine for Internet of Things": http://samsung.github.io/jerryscript/

msie• 10 years ago

The only thing JS has going for it is it's wide adoption. Basing a new language on it to run on low end devices just seems like a dead-end for me. At least the first link is to a typed subset of JS.

cpprototypes• 10 years ago

Samsung is a typical asian electronics company (has a hardware focused history and very good at it, but doesn't understand or respect software). I'm so glad that node.js is not under Joyent control.

wrong_variable2• 10 years ago

I am not sure what Samsung being Asian has to do with anything :)

This is good news for node.js since what this means is more money gets poured into node.js development.

For example Microsoft pouring money into JS seems to have lead directly to Typescript.

seanmcdirmid3• 10 years ago

Samsung does have a somewhat bad reputation in the valley; e.g.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Samsung-Research-America-R...

This could just be clashes between US and Korean management culture, or perhaps just some instability in a new research lab.

smt883• 10 years ago

Microsoft pouring money into JS

Microsoft is a software company. Samsung is not. If you think they are, then you probably haven't used one of their bloated, buggy phones that they stop updating way too soon.

pkaye• 10 years ago

I have no personal experience working for Samsung but know quite a few who did work for their US team and most don't have a positive experience. I also know some who worked for other South Korean companies. Lets just say the Korean work culture is quite different than in a typical US company. Hopefully the Joyent guys will be shielded from all this.

746F7475• 10 years ago

Considering Samsung has been known to push for proprietary technology (they tried to create market of Android apps that would only work on Samsung's phones) I'm little worried there is going to be some sort of new node.js fork that's incompatible with current one and has some weird licensing stuff or something.

Annatar13• 10 years ago

What it has to do with it being Asian is the culture of conformity and group think; this is in stark contrast to Bryan's statement that at Joyent everyone leads and is led by taking individual initiative.

pmontra• 10 years ago

Don't know. There isn't even a word about Node in the statement from then CEO, but before today I didn't even know what the main business of Joyent is so I can't say how they and Samsung think it's important for them. Just figure, my first thought was "Samsung wants Node, but why?" :-) Anyway, it's not tightly bound with Joyent anymore so even a worst case scenario won't affect ot much.

st3v3r2• 10 years ago

I'd say it's terrible news, cause node.js development is going to be influenced heavily by Samsung. Remember Tizen?

jsjohnst• 10 years ago

Having worked in a Samsung office for enough time to have an informed opinion, I can emphatically say that the "hardware focused history" has nothing to do with their lacking on the software front. They have some amazing engineers (especially at HQ in Korea), but the main obstacles are partly Korean culture in general (especially as it pertains to engineers) and partly the management practices of the company. The best things they develop (either in partnership or internally) usually never have a fair leg in the market. I'm certainly not apologizing for the company, just saying don't think the issues you see are directly the engineer's fault.

I don't remember the exact Korean wording, but a common phrase said by Samsung engineers (under their breath) in Korea basically translates to "I'll do what you say, but it's only because I'm at <name of a Japanese labor camp that I forget now>." My time there really made me appreciate how much better we have it here!

jeswin• 10 years ago

They have some amazing engineers (especially at HQ in Korea), but the main obstacles are partly Korean culture in general (especially as it pertains to engineers) and partly the management practices of the company.

Can you explain the cultural aspects (and management shortcomings) in more detail for those of us who haven't experienced Korea? Thanks.

Shinchy• 10 years ago

I've heard that too, I remember a story from a worker who said they put all the Engineers into a room and said they can't leave until an issue was fixed. Took them two days.

jasonlotito2• 10 years ago

Having worked in a Samsung office for enough time to have an informed opinion

That's Samsung proper. Not their incubator setup, which is different. Companies like Mapzen were bought by Samsung, but have a completely different culture.

dmix• 10 years ago

Having good SW engineers languishing under bad management/culture might be worse than having no good engineering talent.

dba7dba• 10 years ago

Why be a racist?

jk.

There's a reason Samsung seems to be not that great as a software shop. I wrote up a long post on HN almost 2 years ago (God, it's been 2 years!!). I'm reposting the link here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712192

dekz• 10 years ago

How do you come to the conclusion that the entirety of Samsung don't understand or respect software, when they clearly show great contributions to OSS? [0].

[0] http://linuxcontrib-inn.rhcloud.com/

gribbly2• 10 years ago

Well, in the case of Linux they are legally bound to provide the source code to any modifications they ship in binary form to a third party due to the GPL, I don't know what their track record is when they don't have to release the source code.

blakeyrat• 10 years ago

There are a lot of projects that are totally open source, and yet terrible software. An awful lot.

jasonlotito2• 10 years ago

Yeah, this comment is ignorance at its finest. Mapzen, for example, was also acquired by Samsung, and it still operates as its own little startup, just with more financial security. Joyent seems to be going the same way. They will remain Joyent, but with support from Samsung.

mattbettinson• 10 years ago

Thought this said Joylent. Was confused.

bbcbasic• 10 years ago

That would be spacex acquires joylent

timjver• 10 years ago

Haha, me as well.

kobayashi• 10 years ago

Glad I'm not the only one.

vermontdevil• 10 years ago

Is this the same company that sponsored the development of Node JS?

dmpk2k3• 10 years ago

Joyent funded most of node.js' development since 2010. Once node became popular and competing companies appeared, with the commensurate agitation and political fallout, Joyent became less involved with it.

bcantrill• 10 years ago

In case anyone's curious, I blogged about the backstory of the acquisition.[1] tl;dr: We at Joyent are elated, and we believe that this will be a huge win for our customers, for our technologies and for the communities that they serve!

[1] https://www.joyent.com/blog/samsung-acquires-joyent-a-ctos-p...

nbrempel• 10 years ago

Congrats Bryan! :D

neom• 10 years ago

Congrats my friend. :)

supster• 10 years ago

Thanks for all your work on Node.js!

nickpsecurity• 10 years ago

Congratulations! Good to see a strong platform combined with my favorite Android company.

newman314• 10 years ago

I'm hoping Joyent can positively affect Smartthings...

xer0x• 10 years ago

Congrats Bryan

xorgar831• 10 years ago

This is great news! Would love to see your tech in a datacenter in US central, would use it in a sec. :)

dang2• 10 years ago

That's more substantive and less press-releasey than https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-to-acquire-joyent-a-..., so maybe we'll just change the URL to that. Also, congrats!

combatentropy2• 10 years ago

Thank you for not burying the lede! It's a lost art.

thinkloop• 10 years ago

What does burying the lede mean in the context of hn?

ethbro4• 10 years ago

Never saw it as "lede". Thanks for my new thing of the morning!

Wiki: "In journalism, lede is an alternative spelling for lead paragraph."

phaet0n• 10 years ago

Congratulations. I hope Samsung nurtures the technical excellence at Joyent.

Please, please continue to develop your public cloud offerings. Having options other that the myopic, me-too, feature-matching, monoculture that is AWS/GCE/Azure is incredibly important.

That said, for my use profile, you guys need to work on your price competitiveness. Hopefully Samsung will inject the necessary cash for economies-of-scale.

rms_returns• 10 years ago

Congratulations. I hope Samsung nurtures the technical excellence at Joyent.

I'm sure they will. They are a top contributor to open source:

http://linuxcontrib-inn.rhcloud.com/

pwelch• 10 years ago

I second that. I also hope they add necessary resources to grow SmartOS.

jimpick• 10 years ago

Congrats!

ubersol1• 10 years ago

Congrats Bryan!!!

simonebrunozzi• 10 years ago

Congrats! Very smart move by Samsung.

fitzwatermellow• 10 years ago

Nice win. SaaS M&A so hot right now ;)

We use Joyent for nodejs microservices, chiefly any server side DOM manipulations (using jsdom), and it's been solid! Currently evaluating docker container management and will give Triton a go...

CyberDildonics• 10 years ago

I'm happy for you. I love your talks and your passion for good software that goes beyond feature checklists and the bare minimum to ship and be patched later. Have fun and fuck Oracle, the anti King Midas of companies.

dimino• 10 years ago

Has anyone in your position ever written to say, "Meh, not optimistic about this"?

Just saying, there's a bit of bias that's probably worth recognizing.

mzs• 10 years ago

Congratulations Bryan, I learned so much from you in such a short period of time, forever grateful, good roads!

tw04• 10 years ago

Bryan - hope you see this since I don't appear to have your email anymore. Do you guys have a list of maximums for Manta anywhere? Specifically object count - but node count/total storage/etc. I'm guessing that was part of the samsung testing :)

hitr2• 10 years ago

I always thought Microsoft/Google or the likes would acquire Joyent as it is good product fit. Microsoft chose linkedin instead :) For Samsung this is all about IoT .Samsung wants to own both the devices and backend. A good move IMHO

smt883• 10 years ago

Joyent as it is good product fit. Microsoft chose linkedin instead

It's a good product fit, but the fit is so good that Microsoft basically built a more-complete competitor in the form of Azure. They built Joyent instead of buying it.

LinkedIn was different because Microsoft could never build LinkedIn itself.

hitr2• 10 years ago

Microsoft has good PaaS story when it comes to .NET stack. Especially product Azure App Service[1].All though it can technically host nodejs,java etc ,it still is based on IIS and windows stack. Joyent has more native offering for nodejs which could have been Paas for nodejs(Azure App Service for nodejs )

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/web/

tracker14• 10 years ago

MS already has Azure, with an infrastructure built on their windows core... Not to mention having more services... and while Joyent's Docker story is really nice, MS seems to be heading in a very similar direction with the Windows Subsystem for Linux as Joyent took with SmartOS/Solaris, it's a poor tech fit.

I'm not sure where this will take things with Samsung, likely backend services to support their own "store" on their devices separate from Android. If it's internalized, I only hope they release more of their infrastracture tooling, which is very cool to say the least.

jen202• 10 years ago

There is a world of difference between a new, untested implementation of Linux system call translation to a _very_ different type of Kernel on a desktop class operating system than the version on Illumos. The best thing Microsoft could do with their cloud is burn it to the ground and start again with Joyent's tech.

ci5er• 10 years ago

As Microsoft becomes the new IBM, except for XBox, their future revenue is firmly from the Global 10000 Enterprise space. LinkedIn gives them the entire database (up to date! SF.com doesn't give you that!) of decision makers in their target market and their web of professional relationships.

hoodoof• 10 years ago

I wonder how much for.

krakensden• 10 years ago

Good luck on your incredible journey.

bigiain• 10 years ago

Hmmm, not sure if you're being genuine or snarky...

http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

dang2• 10 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913723 and marked it off-topic.

ruffrey• 10 years ago

Luckily they did not acquire Node.js

edit: I should have been more specific.. when an open source project is under a company's wing and it gets acquired, you don't know what can happen, even under MIT. Look at express recently. Since it's the under the Node Foundation now, this is not a big deal. Had it happened a short time ago, there may have been further turmoil in the community.

dmpk2k3• 10 years ago

Given that Node.js has always been MIT licensed, that's impossible. That's one reason why it had a liberal license; just listen to Cantrill's Oracle rants sometime to get a better idea.

cyphar10• 10 years ago

Cantrill advocated the fact that CDDL was copyleft as a good thing[1] (it's a bad license overall, but the point is the same) specifically mentioning that the fact that Oracle couldn't use new DTrace and ZFS improvements from the community was a good thing. I agree (though I much prefer the GPL).

So actually all of Cantrill's worries with Oracle exist with Node.js's license. I am sad when I see large free software projects licensed under MIT, we are doing ourselves a disservice by allowing proprietary software to take advantage of the free software we've developed.

[1] It's part of his Fork Yeah! talk about the fork that is illumos.

pron• 10 years ago

What does the license have to do with anything? Joyent themselves are now behind SmartOS, which is based on Solaris and its CDDL license. An open source license being more free or more liberal has absolutely nothing with the ability of the community to fork and/or continue support if the original owner discontinues it.

berns• 10 years ago

I think they still own the trademark. So even if anyone can fork node.js they can't use the name.

vacri• 10 years ago

It's already been successfully forked once, under 'io.js', when a group of developers were frustrated at the slow pace of Joyent's custodianship. io.js came back to node.js after politicking.

bdcravens• 10 years ago

Had the projects not merged back, I'm sure io.js would have gained significant ground, so I don't think this is that big of a deal.

dawnerd• 10 years ago

Same initial reaction. I can't stand Samsung and refuse to have anything to do with them. All started when they took my 5k dollar tv and started injecting ads and such all while claiming they didn't (this was before the recent media caught on)

sintaxi• 10 years ago

Hats off Samsung. You have just acquired a truly world class Engineering team.

Congrats to all my former colleagues who are absolutely amazing at their jobs and wonderful people to work with. Samsung looks like a very good match. Hope the transition goes well.

thinkingkong• 10 years ago

Same. Great working with the entire engineering team at Joyent.

Negative1• 10 years ago

Forgive my ignorance but can someone explain how Joyent's acquisition moves Samsung towards their strategic objectives? In other words, how are they going to exploit this technology (and brain gain)?

ptio• 10 years ago

Samsung generates a lot of sensor/IoT type of data (e.g. smart phones, smart TVs, medical, industrial). They'll need the infrastructure to process and store all these data.

combatentropy2• 10 years ago

From the CTO's blog post, it seems to me that Samsung became interested in Joyent not for its most famous product, Node.js, but for its new product, Manta, which is some sort of serverless, distributed, data-storage and processing service (https://www.joyent.com/manta). Manta might be well-suited for the new hotness, the Internet of Things.

So that's how I saw it progressing. Samsung was looking into how to get in on the Internet of Things, stumbled across Manta, and it went from there.

ilaksh• 10 years ago

Manta seems like they are throwing the kitchen sink at those problems, tons of containers, proprietary OS, proxies, etc.

If you want to store objects in a distributed way, why not just use something like RethinkDB, which has proxying/sharding etc. built in? RethinkDB even has a way to execute code with 'js'.

Or for serverless processing, why not AWS lambda or the crop of clones?

y04nn• 10 years ago

I have the same reaction, for me samsung is more a hardware company and the software they make is only to support their hardware. So is all future Joyent software development will be close sourced and only used by Samsung?

bobsil1• 10 years ago

This is John Gruber's nightmare :) (worked at Joyent before Daring Fireball)

pazimzadeh2• 10 years ago

It looks like Daring Fireball is still hosted on Joyent, soon to be Samsung.

https://twitter.com/gruber/status/560507384536498176

alrs• 10 years ago

This is great news for on-prem object storage. I look forward to seeing how big Samsung is able to go with Manta.

sidcool• 10 years ago

I wonder what would Samsung gain from an IaaS kind of company. Do they have an IaaS product? Or is it for internal use?

corv• 10 years ago

"Joyent will operate as a standalone company under Samsung and continue providing cloud infrastructure and software services to its customers"

andrewwhartion• 10 years ago

Well done guys on staying solvent longer than the market could stay irrational!

subway• 10 years ago

SmartOS will be on ARM within 12 months. Calling it.

Annatar13• 10 years ago

I sure hope so, but the high performance nature and intent of SmartOS is at odds with the low electricity consumption, low number crunching performance of the Acorn RISC Machines processor. SmartOS is optimized for CPU bursting and squeezing as many tenants at bare metal speed as possible, while ARM is designed not to consume lots of power at the expense of raw performance.

That said, since SmartOS is based on illumos, and illumos is designed from the ground up to be portable, running SmartOS on ARM would be cool, since it would open the doors for illumos on embedded devices.

I would so love me an illumos based, iPad Pro-like tablet...

ranty• 10 years ago

It's pretty much welded to x86 and it's entire design is server-only. It'd be much, much harder to port than just using Android.

e12e• 10 years ago

Android on servers, like Linux? SmartOS on Arm servers would probably make a lot of sense, given that Samsung might then have a vertically integrated infrastructure: mainboard/chipset, cpu, ram, ssd and software all made by Samsung for Samsung?

a_small_island• 10 years ago

Joyent raised over $125M in venture [0], and no mention of a price? Wonder how the employees faired in this...

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/joyent

knurdle2• 10 years ago

Hey, maybe Joyent can finally afford to refund the people who supported it when it was textdrive and then went back on their word! Snarky I know but I'm still bitter about how it was all handled..

lftl• 10 years ago

As a fellow early textdrive supporter, I'm pretty happy with the value I got out of the deal. I'm still using my free strongspace account 10ish years later. I think there was some email about a free hosting account I could theoretically use with some company, but I never looked into it. Honestly, textdrive's hosting was never really of a quality I could use in a professional context anyway. I understand some bitterness, but any "lifetime" deal has to be taken with a pretty big grain of salt, and I'm pretty happy about what I got for the money.

darylfritz• 10 years ago

I think there was some email about a free hosting account I could theoretically use with some company, but I never looked into it.

We were offered either one or three free years of hosting on a Joyent SmartMachine, depending on what your initial investment was. After this free trial, you would be converted to a regular customer.

Adding my voice to the bitter-parade. Joyent wouldn't be where they are today without us early bootstrap investors. It was basically a Kickstarter campaign before Kickstarter existed. Not only do I feel like I failed to receive my early investor benefits, but WORSE off was how the whole situation was handled. We had to beg and plead to get our data back. The company essentially went dark to all of their oldest, most loyal customers.

knurdle2• 10 years ago

It wasn't about the money or the value I got out of it. For me, it was the way I felt like I was treated. It felt like, hey, we've pivoted the company but we still have to support these old users and they are becoming a pain, let's give them a credit on something that's kinda like what they paid for and be done with them. Then when enough people complained, then they tried to find some solution at the last minute and even that felt dubious. Let's try to cobble something together that's barely working for these people and make it someone else's problem.

I totally take the "lifetime" deal with a grain of salt but it wasn't like the company folded because it ran out of money or wasn't successful. It was more like we got successful so we forgot about the little people.

step1profit• 10 years ago

"How long is it good for? As long as we exist." As a lifetime plan purchaser, I wouldn't say no to a new Samsung fridge... Although, I think we're just beating the dead horse for old time sake—which in this case is fun in itself. Though, it would be kinda awesome to hear a Samsung exec weigh in on the matter.

drinchev• 10 years ago

For those unfamiliar with the case :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextDrive

minsight2• 10 years ago

I will never, ever consider using Joyent in any capacity for this very reason.

minsight2• 10 years ago

Although perhaps Samsung's acquisition might continue with the trend, improving Joyent's bottom line by ignoring all previous financial obligations that may have existed before the purchase...

bogomipz3• 10 years ago

I'm sorry but how is this a good fit? What is the synergy here? This particular sentence is incredibly vapid:

"By bringing these two companies together we are creating the opportunity to develop and bring to market vertically integrated mobile and IoT services and solutions that deliver extraordinary simplicity and value to our customers."

unixhero• 10 years ago

Congrats Bryan.

If anybody deserve it, it's you guys.

leommoore• 10 years ago

Best wishes to all at Joyent. Thanks for all your work in the community over the last few years, particularly with node.js. Hopefully Samsung will give you the resources and reach to go on to better things in future.

monatron• 10 years ago

As I toil away on a node based project that is interfacing with Samsung's Artik platform (both the Artik 10 board and Artik Cloud) I finally decided to call it a night -- check HN real quick -- and discover that Samsung is buying the original stewards of node. I almost thought the lack of sleep was putting me into psychosis...

ClassyPuff• 10 years ago

Great news and good acquisition as well. Great work Samsung!!!!!

urza2• 10 years ago

Cloud orchestration, Container Orchestration, Kubernetes... I think I am getting old and starting to understand how my parents feel about technology.

I am developer, but mostly work on desktop apps, or embedded devices or lataly on some MVC applications. But reading things like

"A Container-Native Stack for Modern Applications and Operations Increase development velocity while simplifying operations."

I have no idea what should I imagine and what is it good for...

any good introduction or explanation into what is it they actually do?

eliah• 10 years ago

This might be more in-depth than what you're looking for, but I found this (long) slideshow useful: https://joshpadnick.com/2015/09/01/my-talk-on-choosing-the-r...

novaleaf• 10 years ago

I always think (thought?) containers are good if you own your own hardware. I use 'micro' cloud vm instances for my deployments and don't feel the need to squish more functionality into a $5/month VM.

moondev• 10 years ago

For the most part if your application is developed 12 factor style: http://12factor.net, you shouldn't have to worry about these things as a developer. Stuff like this is more in the ops space.

Cloud orchestration: the logic for how your platform provisions and launches instances (think ec2) into your fleet of resources.

Container orchestration: the logic for how your applications (containers) are distributed across your fleet of instances

Kubernetes: Software that runs on your fleet and manages how/where/when container orchestration happens. There are many players in this space such as mesosphere, swarm, ecs and so on.

bkanber7• 10 years ago

So, you build a web app and it gets popular. It needs one load balancer, 5 app servers, at least two database nodes for replication, a redis cluster for caching and queuing, an elasticsearch cluster for full text search, and a cluster of job worker servers to do async stuff like processing images, etc.

In the ancient past, like when I'm from, you'd write up a few different bash scripts to help you provision each server type. But setting this all up, you'd still have to run around and create 20 servers and provision them into one of 5 different types, etc.

Then there's chef/puppet, which takes your bash script and makes it a little more maintainable. But there are still issues: huge divide between dev/prod environments, and adding 5 new nodes ASAP is still tedious.

Now you have cloud and container orchestration. Containers are like the git repos of the server world. You build a container to run each of your apps (nginx, redis, etc), configure each once (like coding and committing), and then they work identically on dev and prod after you launch them (you can clone/pull onto hardware). And what's more, since a container image is pre-built, it launches on metal in a matter of seconds, not minutes. All the apt-get install crap was done at image build time, not container launch time.

Things are a lot easier now, but you still have a problem. You're scaling to 30, maybe 50 different servers running 6 or 7 different services. More and more you want to treat your hardware as a generic compute cloud, but you can't escape that, even with docker, your servers have identities and personalities. You still need to sit and think about which of your 50 servers to launch a container on, and make sure it's under the correct load balancer, etc.

That's where Kubernetes steps in; it's a level of abstraction higher than docker, and works at the cluster level. You define services around your docker containers, and let Kubernetes initialize the hardware, and abstract it away into a giant compute cloud, and then all you have to do is tell kubernetes to scale a certain service up and down, and it automatically figures out which servers to take the action on and modifies your load balancer for that service accordingly.

At the scale of "a few servers", Kubernetes doesn't help much. At the scale of dozens or hundreds, it definitely does. "Orchestration" isn't just a buzzword, it's the correct term here; all those containers and services and pieces of hardware DO need to be wrangled. In the past it was a full time sysadmin job, now it's just a Kubernetes or Fleet config file.

Disclosure: I'm currently writing a book on Docker. Disclaimer: I have not had my coffee yet.

Edit: Since someone asked, I'm writing a book called "Complete Docker" which will be published by Apress. I don't know the exact pub date that Apress will launch it on, but I expect it'll be available in October.

edc117• 10 years ago

As someone more in the development end of things, this was an excellent summary, thank you.

the_common_man• 10 years ago

Despite your lack of coffee, that was a pretty good read. Thanks for your write up.

textmode• 10 years ago

Is it true that HN runs on a single server, running FreeBSD?

Raphmedia• 10 years ago

We need a HN Best-of comment section and we need to put your comment into it.

markatkinson2• 10 years ago

This is why I read HN...

cloverich• 10 years ago

Given the quality submission, I feel like it would be fair to include a link to the book your writing (or a title so we can search for it when its done). Disclosure: I want to buy it.

epalmer• 10 years ago

Thanks. Not sure you need coffee. Your comment was awesome.

urza2• 10 years ago

Wau thanks, that is an excellent explanation. I appreciate that it start with things I know and understand ("so you build a web app"/"bash scripts"/"puppet") and builds on that explaining what problems each consecutive steps /layer of abstraction/ solves.

Now I wonder.. how many projects actually needs these kind of solution when even StackOverflow can do without it (they are in the range of few servers)? I would imagine it would be only few top popular web apps/services, but by popularity of these posts it looks like it is probably a lot more...

mschuster91• 10 years ago

All the apt-get install crap was done at image build time, not container launch time.

Something I never understood with containers: where do they store persistent data, e.g. MySQL's /var/lib/mysql - and how does upgrading work, i.e. when the apt-get postinstall script runs transformation on the persistent data, how is the transformation applied to the "clones"?

jerf• 10 years ago

The way I think about it: I remember in the 1990s when you needed to put up some web pages, you had to bring up an entire "web server", and that's all the server would do.

Now, think about it from a reductionistic engineering perspective. What do I really want this server to do? Well, it accepts TCP connections, parses a request to figure out which file (at the time, it was all files) to server, sticks an HTTP header on the file, and shoves it down the socket.

This task is so simple that a skilled network programmer can nowadays literally bash together a 1990s-level static HTTP server in an day, with nothing but a socket library and some basic string handling. (It may not be great and it probably is insecure, but, well... see also "1990s web server"....) The code to do this is perhaps in the dozens or hundreds of kilobytes.

But that's not what I had. I have a full computer that physically needs to live somewhere. It has hardware ethernet and hardware graphics cards and a physical monitor and a power supply and RAM and, basically, hardware hardware hardware, the failure of any one of which means the system is either difficult to change or outright down. I have an entire Windows operating system, which even in the 1990s was hundreds of megabytes of code, endless code. Code for a windowing system, for pete's sake. Code for the audio subsystem. Code for accessing the hard drive. Code for access code that accesses code. Code code code code code, a bug in any one of which means the system may be down or insecure. My website, which at the time was quite likely in single-digit megabytes in size, was a tiny directory lost in a sea of files on the hard drive.

Over the past 20 years, the commodity hardware world [1] has been slicing away at the fact that several dozen kilobytes of code are being accompanied by hundreds of megabytes of support and literal pounds of physical hardware. Hardware went first with VMs. VMs got lighter and lighter. Lightweight hypervisor solutions sliced away at the heaviness of the VM. Containers slice away at the OS. Things like Kubernates slice away at the idea of a container living somewhere physically.

We're trying to free that several dozen kilobytes of code to be just several dozen kilobytes of code, as flexible and easy-to-deploy as several dozen kilobytes should be, if you weren't mired in the world of hardware and OSes and code and strong physical connections.

(Data storage is more complicated, but in a lot of ways, the same principles are in play.)

Operationally, containers are very exciting. However, in terms of "magic technologies I don't understand", I don't think they're worth stressing about "getting old" or anything. It's mostly "just" a big pile of practical considerations in trying to not just build that world, but in some sense also undo decades of grinding-in of the physical world to our operational considerations. If you want worry about getting old and out-of-date, worry about that let you do something that you couldn't before, like GPU programming or deep learning.

[1]: Which must be specified because mainframes beat us all here decades ago, in a lot of ways.

lasryaric• 10 years ago

this is one of the best comment on HN! Love it!

kichuku• 10 years ago

Just because of how clearly you have explained it, I would surely want to buy your book when it releases. As of now, I know nothing about Docker except one or two buzz lines. And by reading your book when it releases, I am sure I can get a full picture. BTW, who will be target audience for your book?

jimbokun2• 10 years ago

Most helpful sentence:

"At the scale of "a few servers", Kubernetes doesn't help much. At the scale of dozens or hundreds, it definitely does."

So now I know I don't need to learn much about Kubernetes unless I have "dozens or hundreds" of servers to manage.

Abundnce10• 10 years ago

Do you have a wait list or place I can go to get notified once the book is published?

bartread• 10 years ago

^^^THIS is an absolutely great comment. I realise this isn't the major thrust of it, but it's the single best description of what containerisation is, and what problem it solves, that I've ever seen.

Annatar13• 10 years ago

Hopefully your book will mention in big bold Red letters why it's crucial that all the files except for data inside of a Docker image be OS packaged, every single one of them, especially the configuration files, and show how configuration management can be performed efficiently and at scale with OS packaging, as well as how one might perform change management with the whole lot.

And hopefully your book will mention SmartOS and Triton and zones providing full isolation for Docker.

knownothing• 10 years ago

all these answers are helpful but misguided. it is a lot of jargon but there is some value to be had, depending on your situation.

i'd argue that this situation is if you're a developer at a large company or enterprise. developing can be a nightmare because testing and/or deploying is so difficult. sometimes this is by design, sometimes by virtue of incompetence. other times people want to change it, they just don't know how.

tools like this claim they can change this. whether that's true or not. well, that depends on more than just what tools you use but it is part of the equation.

iamleppert• 10 years ago

Mostly sell snake oil to big companies that don't have popular apps. lol

sjtgraham• 10 years ago

I think I am getting old and starting to understand how my parents feel about technology.

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

- Douglas Adams

crudbug• 10 years ago

Next up some SmartOS desktop / mobile builds

OhHeyItsE• 10 years ago

Can anyone shed some light (speculate, perhaps) on Samsung's strategy here? Just seems like an odd pairing to me.

ChrisArchitect• 10 years ago

wow, Joyent. Took me a bit to remember what they were doing in the early early days since we're multiple generations or pivots or focus-shifts on now......but it was Textdrive/Textile/Textpattern CMS. Ha. Different times. At least some of that still out there in OSS Land

beaugunderson• 10 years ago

One company with all-male board & management team buys another company with all-male board & management team.

d2ncal• 10 years ago

If anyone has a good background, what exactly does Joyent have that is so valuable?

It seems that NodeJS has moved out of Joyent. They have hosted container support that seems to run on solaris, which seems interesting, but a bit too much of buzz-wordy from their website.

I am not very familiar with this, so will be great if someone can explain a little bit. I read the comments around orchestration, but am more interested in Joyent's value proposition.

caffed• 10 years ago

Ok... Let's start on iojs 7!

yangtheman• 10 years ago

As a Korean American who also has worked at Samsung headquarters, I think it's more of bad news than good news, no matter how Joyent wants to spin it.

Its corporate culture only allows the most cunning, politically savvy person to stay alive and move up the rank, and thus most executives (all if I limit it to small sample of executives I've personally met) fit that model.

And shit literally flows downwards, where goals/promises set by them would be pushed downwards and engineers have to take the burden.

It doesn't help that Korean society is very hierarchal and based on Confucius principles, where you don't usually challenge older persons and/or someone higher in the rank. This is one example that describes serious problem - http://thediplomat.com/2013/07/asiana-airlines-crash-a-cockp....

For those of you who are intrigued and have time, I suggest watching Misaeng with English subtitles (https://www.viki.com/tv/20812c-incomplete-life). Samsung isn't as bad, but the same hierarchy, verbal abuse, social dynamics, and strict rules on paper format exist.

The best outcome would be if they leave Joyent's management and culture alone. But I doubt it.

I also have the first-hand experience of their applying the same "consumer electronics" mentality to completely different business which required high-touch sales.

There is no denying success of Samsung - multi-billion, international corporation. However, Samsung is only good at generating quality hardware products at mass scale. There have not been success in any sort of software and services. Perhaps they are trying to expand beyond their strengths, and I applaud that effort and they actually do need it, since it's only matter of time Chinese companies will catch up and produce as quality products as Samsung, as Samsung did to Sony. I hope it bears fruits. I hope they can allow Joyent to succeed and thrive, and learn from that.

I will see what happens next few years.

carapace• 10 years ago

(Thin sans-serif body text means you hate your readers.)

st3v3r2• 10 years ago

Well that sucks. They had a good run, but Samsung's business culture is probably going to ruin them. Just check out some of the stories of their internal software engineering process.

Samsung Acquires Joyent

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