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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

Less then a month migration period.

If you factor in that not much work is getting done in many western countries until early January the actual migration time is more like less than two weeks.

Now I don't know how easy it is to move from hyper.sh to alternatives, but that is unprofessionally short regardless.

I would have expected at least three months. Is it possible that they are that short on money that they need to shut it down immediately? Seems like it.

Let that be a lesson to not rely on cloud infrastructure too much without designing your architecture to be somewhat cloud agnostic.

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Indeed. This is a headache for me.

My service is entirely dependent on Hyper.sh and there seems to be no trivial migration path. I think I shall have to drop everything I was planning to do after the holidays and rearchitect for Kubernetes. :(

A few years ago, I ran a similar company that I also shut down, so it would be hypocritical of me to complain much. Competing with AWS is hard. (We did give users 3 months to migrate though.)

"Let that be a lesson to not rely on cloud infrastructure too much without designing your architecture to be somewhat cloud agnostic."

Not disagreeing per se, but I believe it's much more important to design for migration between providers instead of designing for abstraction over providers. The difference is subtle, but trying to make predictions about what needs abstraction will most likely lead to the same (or bigger) costs when a migration actually happens.

It's a bit like the general advice to design to avoid getting stuck in a hole as opposed to designing to getting out of future holes.

I believe it's much more important to design for migration between providers instead of designing for abstraction over providers

Right. If you design to be cloud agnostic that means only using the lowest common denominator of features, and while it’s doable it’s not cost effective. The price structure is designed to shepherd you into the managed services.

The thing that drew me to Hyper.sh in the first place was the fact that it used the Docker Remote API. That gave me some confidence it would be provider agnostic. Unfortunately no other providers have done this, so that idea didn't pan out.

I thought Joyent had a container service that used the Docker Remote API?

Joyent Triton

https://www.joyent.com/triton/compute

A few years ago (when I last checked} their container startup times were a lot slower than hyper.sh's

> Let that be a lesson to not rely on cloud infrastructure too much without designing your architecture to be somewhat cloud agnostic.

We need SaaS: Services as a Service

You're basically describing Openshift.

Hm, "professionalism", to me, is a weird criticism to levy against a product or business that is presumably shutting down due to failure or lack of funding. Is it common, or expected, that startups allocate funds for clean shutdowns? I assume it's just burning through cash trying to make it work, until it becomes so unavoidable that you have to shutter suddenly.

>Let that be a lesson to not rely on cloud infrastructure too much without designing your architecture to be somewhat cloud agnostic.

Yeah, but no one that matters, cares - whether it's writing blog posts or putting your entire company brand/presence/blog on Medium (which harasses all of your readers), or relying on low-margin infra startups that often amount to a thin docs/marketing layer around Docker.

Just like the same people that get hosed by their hosting/DNS providers with a history of screwing users... because they didn't think it would happen to them -- people are lazy, people think they're exceptional, and I think a bunch of people don't like learning infra and don't see it as important.

If they are actually out of money, they don't have any other option than to shut it down. You can't blame anyone for that. A lot of startups wouldn't have the option to budget for an orderly shutdown.

But their email doesn't say anything about being out of money, just that they are focusing on a different technology.

That's why I brought it up. If you have to shut down, own up to the real reason. If not, you are screwing your users to focus on something else.

I'd bet that they just can't cover the bills anymore, though.

You’re still making a decision to slow feature development for the relatively small risk that your cloud provider goes under.

Personally I’d rather just pick the most popular platform as a better decision to hedge against the risk.

That way you'd be indirectly promoting a monopoly and raising their incentives to raise their prices ...

Maybe they don't have any customers for this product?

If they do however, it's a dick move to pull out the rug with this much notice over a period when a lot of people are away for much of it...

Well, they're not out of cash - at least not right now. It appears to be a pivot. I'd therefore have to agree with your assessment that it's a dick move.

> Maybe they don't have any customers for this product?

I don't think they have many, but I'm one of them. Not pleased at all w/ the migration time.

Could this be due to a fatal security issue? Running untrusted code side by side on native hardware doesn't give you a whole lot of room to patch vulnerabilities ...

And the situation has gotten a lot worse in the last year.

But Hyper uses lightweight virtual machines for multi-tenancy - they were actually one the providers who got it right. It was one of their unique selling points.

Ok, I wasn’t the only one. Plus, right during the holiday season!!! What were they thinking!?

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