Ask HN: How is Quilt different from ClusterHQ?

3 points by promopacket 8 years ago | 2 comments

I just noticed a Quilt job posting on the front page [0] and am wondering what is different about Quilt compared to the late ClusterHQ.

If you recall, ClusterHQ created FlockerHub, and wanted to be "Git for Data". Then in December of 2016, right before the holidays, ClusterHQ abruptly shutdown [1] [2].

Coincidentally, I had interviewed there a month before. After going through the process and meeting the team I was left feeling the mission and product were too much a solution in search of a problem, so I passed. Then while I was living it up in Hawaii I was shell shocked to learn they'd abruptly closed up shop, with a public blog post titled "Cluster F*cked" [1].

Now I keep seeing these Quilt job postings on HN and am left wondering, is it more or less the same thing? A solution in search of a problem? What is different about Quilt vs. ClusterHQ?

Quilt's homepage seems to be selling the exact same pipe dream story and hawking similar wares...

[0] https://quilt-data.breezy.hr/p/15c4a8807cf6-technical-lead

[1] http://archive.is/vjiLw

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13239032

itamarst 8 years ago |

I used to work at ClusterHQ, left in April 2016. Some background-

Last day at my job the co-founders were ousted by the board and CEO (the CEO who eventually wrote that post about Clusterfucked), and all the employees in the UK were laid off. Much of the US engineering team left over next few months, and new members hired, so by the time you interviewed it was almost a completely new team.

One of the those co-founders, Luke Marsden, and some other people from original ClusterHQ have started https://dotmesh.com/, which perhaps expresses the original vision better.

I can't say whether the product idea is a good one, though I've definitely talked to people who would find it useful.

As far as Quilt goes:

* The ClusterHQ vision was based on filesystem snapshots (probably Dotmesh too). Thus use case might be "take cheap snapshot of database whenever a 500 error occurs, for later debugging".

* The Quilt vision is data science-oriented, it understands the underlying data, and e.g. exposes it to data science tools like Jupyter.

So they're going after very different markets.

promopacket 8 years ago |

Easily clickable links:

[0] https://quilt-data.breezy.hr/p/15c4a8807cf6-technical-lead

[1] http://archive.is/vjiLw

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13239032