If you don't know what ZFS and zfs-snapshots are, you are not the target audience of the service. No sense in trying to explain it.

If you have even the slightest knowledge about zfs-snapshots, the product is self-explanatory.

Because it's an alpha product and they do not want those types of users right now.

They're literally trying to filter out uninformed users.

Customer discrimination is a perfectly valid tactic in certain scenarios. Do you dispute this?

I think it is not the purpose of this site to explain somebody how ZFS works, because this is simply just not done in 2 sentences. You need some hours and days to get the idea of ZFS.

I'm not asking for that, I am asking for a short, clear description of what their service is good for and why I might want it.

It's a 8TB ZFS-formated Drive in a Data-center which you can access over ssh...is everything written.

But if you like Marketing-Sites..please read that:

https://www.hashicorp.com/products/consul

And now explain to me what it is please...

It’s funny how “DNS” doesn’t appear anywhere on that page.

In case you're actually fishing for an explanation, Consul is basically a Very Nice™ DNS server for your service infrastructure.

Hashicorp is great but should really start adding some real-world-sysadmin language to their websites.

Every piece of tech is generally worth the time investment, but you have to trust them and start learning the tool before you can realise what it actually does.

Consul is one such case...

Consul is much more than DNS of course, but at the core it's DNS.

Unless you describe it as fancy DNS with extra features, it's description page doesn't make much sense.

>Hashicorp is great but should really start adding some real-world-sysadmin language to their websites.

Oh yes Hashicorp is great please don't get me wrong, but if you just read that landing-page it's like WTF. But if you know what Hashi is doing and read the Documentation just a little bit everything becomes clear...but that page alone just sounds like pure Marketing blabla cloud stuff.

I'm sure it was A/B tested for sales purposes.

I think engineers know the reputation of hashicorp products at this point. The marketing site is for the C-suite people, documentation is for the technical people.

FWIW, their documentation pages [1] are actually a great landing page for technical readers. The comparison to other software is pretty good for "grounding" consul into your other infra.

[1]: https://www.consul.io/docs/intro [2]: https://www.consul.io/docs/intro/vs

Yes. I hope I wasn't misunderstood.

I've used Consul, Vault, Vagrant and Terraform so far and all of them are worth the time investment (Nomad is on the todo-list but for personal reasons I cannot play with it right now).

It'd be great if Hashicorp used less marketing bs and provided a clearer description... At first I glanced the Vault description, didn't really understand what it was supposed to do and walked away thinking "I probably don't need it". Which is bad because once I started using it I really loved it.

If you don’t understand it, maybe that was intentional on their part to not do business with you. It’s not a successful path in all cases, but if you have a niche product targeting a small audience, I can see value in what they did.

It's axiomatic.

If you don't understand how you may need their service, you do not need their service. I'd welcome being proven wrong, but I would bet money there's not a single customer they're missing by their current front page.

The only way you, as a person not knowing what ZFS is, would have any use of their service is if you, after explanation, are so motivated to pay them money that you change your own data hosting to match a service you previously didn't know you needed even if stumbling over it.

They did that. You're not their target market.

In the same way UI/UX can be used to get novice/ non-technical users into something it can also be used to filter them out.

Because such an explanation will lead to:

1. Near-zero conversions. If you aren't already using ZFS, you aren't going to start just to use this service. And If you do use ZFS, you likely know what `zfs send` does.

2. The few conversions that do happen are almost certain to be high-maintenance.

I don't think they want to have to spend time doing tech support for people who don't already know what ZFS is.

Bingo haha. That's exactly it. I'm not trying to hide ZFS or simplify it for the end-user. At least not yet.

It's all about creating products that we would want to use. So that's exactly what we did.

If you actually want to learn about ZFS and how it works, there's a submission today on the front page that you should spend some time on

https://www.servethehome.com/an-introduction-to-zfs-a-place-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25157491