We've been running Kubernetes (500+ containers) in production for over a year now. I believe (and hope) that 2017 will be the year that persistent data storage will be solved. We are ready to move our data out of OpenStack and have our data services (Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB) join the rest of our apps on Kube-orchestrated infrastructure.<p>But, we're not there yet. The options just aren't good enough. Look at the list of PV types for Kube [1]. You have technologies like Fibre Channel that are simply too expensive when compared with local storage on a Linux server. There's iSCSI, which is mostly the same story. Ceph is great for object storage but not performant enough for busy databases. GCE and AWS volumes are not applicable to our private cloud [2]. Cinder, to me, has the stench of OpenStack. Maybe it's better now? NFS? No way. Not performant.<p>I'm looking forward to seeing what shakes out in the next few months. It's just really hard to beat local storage right now.<p>[1] <a href="http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/persistent-volumes/#types-of-persistent-volumes" rel="nofollow">http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/persistent-volumes/#typ...</a><p>[2] Beyond a certain size, it becomes more cost-effective to host your own Kubernetes cluster on managed or colocated hardware.
How many people were employed at ClusterHQ? Honestly I never even heard of the company but I had heard of some of the open source projects. Maybe I'm just out of the loop.<p>Also any information as to lessons learned, etc? Basically why it failed? Looking at the marketing material I didn't see anything really remarkable about it (nothing that stood out as a "oh this is why I would give them money") so I'm curious.<p>> I’ve been part of big successes as well as failures. While the former are more pleasurable, the latter must be relished as a valuable part of life, especially in Silicon Valley.<p>Relished? I never really understood the Silicon Valley "failing is awesome!" mentality. Failure is failure. It's not awesome. Why would you relish it? Take the lessoned learned for sure but you likely just lost several people's money and you lost your employees their jobs, what is there to take enjoyment from? Seems a little sadistic and a tad lacking in empathy for others involved.<p>But maybe that's just me.
This is Michael from ClusterHQ. Just wanted to say thanks to everyone in the community who helped make the last 2 and a half years a great experience. Sad that it's ending now, but excited for what's to come.
- December 22, 2016: ClusterF<i></i>*ed
- December 15, 2016: Reflecting on a Year of Change and What’s to Come in 2017 ("All in all, 2016 was full of tests and triumphs and I can promise that 2017 will also be a big year for the company.")<p>I'll be the first to admit I don't know anything about this company, but that's an interesting change of heart.
It seems a little odd to do this 3 days before Christmas. Holiday depression is already a real problem, and making people unemployed a few days before the holiday sounds like a bad thing.<p>And it's a terrible time to be job hunting.<p>Why not hold on a few more weeks, let employees enjoy the holidays and announce in mid-January when employees can actually talk to hiring managers and get some good job prospects instead of being met with out of office messages?
Or maybe the technology wasn't correct for what most people are trying to do with Docker these days. Flocker never felt like it quite fit in the ecosystem along with Mesos, Kubernetes, etc.<p>Great efforts guys, the tech is cool, but technology will continue to evolve and if you bought into something completely that doesn't fit nicely with the movement, you will get left behind.<p>Edit: not sure why the downvotes, I was not being sarcastic. The comments about why "pioneers get arrows" in the post made it seem like they had a perfect product, the world was just not ready for it.
This is why it's a really bad idea to rely on PaaS/SaaS for your next project. When the company tanks (or cancels the product, changes the API, raises it's prices, etc.) you're screwed. Hope no one out there was heavily commited to FlockerHub.<p>What we really need is better business models for supporting Open-Source.
That's a shame. I've always had great interactions with the ClusterHQ team. Michael, Mohit and Carissa have always been incredibly friendly when I've run into them at Dockercon. Unfortunately my engineering team was never able to fully integrate flocker into our production environment as we relied heavily on custom storage driver actions. Wish you folks all the best in your next projects.
Maybe "stateful containers" aren't a good idea. The whole point of containers is supposed to be that they can be duplicated and loaded into many machine instances. "Stateful containers" with changing databases inside can't be treated that way.
I should make a startup called Trampoline. Other startups pay me insurance premiums and I hop in with a team and salaries for ejected employees to keep doors open for however long they paid for after a crash. As part of the customer SLA they cite Trampoline and the duration of post mortem life being paid for.
> <i>Mark Davis (CEO) explains this opportunity as, “Imagine if you were the 10th engineer at VMware. That’s the kind of experience you’re going to have with us at ClusterHQ.”</i><p>That was from a clusterHQ recruiter's email that I received just a week ago. I thought it was weird to sell a position in that way.<p>I don't find it unreasonable that a recruiter was hiring people while the company is closing down (what do they know?) I'm reminded it's always important to ask for specific financial information when hopping on to a startup. What's your revenue? Expenses? How long is your runway?<p>My condolences to anyone who had hope, time, and effort invested in clusterHQ stock options.
Wow this surprising. I wonder what the reason for shutdown is? Flocker looked like a really cool product but was pretty involved setup wise when I was evaluating it.<p>What are best options now for bare-metal? Ceph? NFS?
Its not like good container storage solutions don't exist for databases and other stateful applications. The problem is in expecting it to be free and open source. Building orchestration or simple file or object storage is easy, but building high performance, resilient, scale out storage that can run on cheap commodity boxes is a difficult task. Once you get over the "free" requirement, there are some good options like ScaleIO and Robin Systems. <a href="https://robinsystems.com/containerization-platform-enterprise-applications/" rel="nofollow">https://robinsystems.com/containerization-platform-enterpris...</a>
It would be interesting to hear what are the alternatives now to what they were trying to do with [flocker](<a href="https://clusterhq.com/flocker/introduction/" rel="nofollow">https://clusterhq.com/flocker/introduction/</a>).<p>The post seems to make the point other alternatives came up that removed their competitive advantage. Anyone here either using flocker or the other alternatives?
I'm sad to hear this. I loved reading Richard Yao's blog posts about ZFS on Linux.<p><a href="https://clusterhq.com/2014/09/11/state-zfs-on-linux/" rel="nofollow">https://clusterhq.com/2014/09/11/state-zfs-on-linux/</a>
How is this company shut down?<p>Almost the same day my Us-based company officially announces to close down, but we haven't been paid since June 2016. I really want to know if this happens in Us<p>See also <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242516" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13242516</a><p>Thanks
Oh the immediate shutdowns! After going through the immediate Nebula shutdown, I'm glad we weren't depending on ClusterHQ.<p>Same question I had for Nebula: you had no idea that a month ago you'd have to shutdown, right?<p>I've started to follow these ex-CEOs so we avoid their next companies. This kind of shutdown is just terrible.
If we're going to celebrate failure can we at least fail with respect, humility, and maybe even a tiny bit of class?<p>The word "sorry" does not appear in this post. Instead of apologizing to investors, users, and employees for letting all of them down the CEO writes a contentless self-aggrandizing post.<p>The CEO also doesn't bother to thank anyone despite being literally and metaphorically indebted to investors, users, and employees for getting as far as they did. [Update: there was "gratitude" - my mistake; sorry]<p>Besides the self-aggrandizing "we did it first" tone of the whole post, here are a few more parts I'd love to see future farewell posts skip:<p>> it’s often the pioneers who end up with arrows in their backs<p>Unless your point is that you were a company who tried to take what wasn't yours and was punished for it... this phrase is awkward-at-best.<p>> I called these “Friends of ClusterHQ” by the sobriquet “FoCkers”<p>The use of "sobriquet" doesn't make your adolescent play on words classy.<p>> The big successes are literally impossible without the many failures. Take a moment to think about that.<p>What a ridiculous thing to tell your audience that includes employees looking for jobs, investors out of money, and users without a service they may have depended on. Out of those 3 groups only investors care about such things. The other 2 groups are collateral damage to your hubris.
Could this be in any way akin to the shutdown of Lavabit? I know it's not the same type of company, but if there was pressure to put back doors in or any sort of compromise, I would support the action.<p>If not, then it's a really bad way to shut up shop. OK the source is out there but given the holiday season people might have appreciated a little warning.