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$3.2M give away of Joyent Accelerators for Facebook Developers

By Rod Boothby 13 November 07

Today at the Facebook Developer Garage in Dallas, Joyent CEO David Young is announcing that we are teaming with Dell to give away $3.2 Million in Joyent Accelerators for Facebook Developers. The program is open to the first 3,500 developers who sign up.

Facebook’s Dave Morin has just posted about it on the Facebook Developers News site, so for those of you who are new to Joyent, the Joyent’s Accelerator™ powered compute cloud provides a highly scalable on-demand infrastructure for running web sites, including rich web applications written in Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python and Java.

Joyent Accelerators are next-generation virtual computers that can grow and multiply (or shrink and consolidate) depending on the real world demands faced by your Web application. Accelerators are built on top of servers and storage running OpenSolaris as their operating system, and utilize Force10 networking, F5 application switching.

Our goal is to really change the game for building a new business or marketing effort. Joyent provides the infrastructure, Facebook provides the viral distribution of a social graph. All you need is the code.

There are no bandwidth limits. Normally, bandwidth costs can kill a young successful Facebook app. What do you do if you have built something from your dorm room, it takes off and suddenly you are faced with thousands of dollars of bandwidth bills?

There is also no latency. We have set up a direct physical fiber optic line between the Joyent data center and Facebook’s data center. Somewhere under San Francisco bay, there is a multiple-gigabit-per-second fiber line capable of pumping massive traffic.

Joyent is committed to supporting the development community and helping you to be successful.

Joyent Facebook Developer Accelerator includes everything needed to develop and deploy Facebook applications, including root access to a virtualized server for developing in PHP, Python and Rails. Example application code is provided.

This program is open to Facebook developers around the world.

To register for your free Joyent Accelerator, please visit the Facebook page on our site.

Other important links:


  1. This is AWESOME news. Quick question though.

    The Facebook sign-up page says:

    >>>“you can have as many applications on the Facebook Accelerator as the resource quotas allow (512 MiB RAM and 10GiB Storage)”

    http://joyent.com/developers/facebook

    Later on the page it says:

    >>>“Free for a year. One Accelerator account per person. $45/month after that. “

    That sounds like a (M) Accelerator at the cost of a (S).

    Can we anticipate a price reduction on (S) and (M) Accelerators any time soon?

    — Tim    598 days ago    #

  2. Hi Tim,

    Sorry, that was a bit of a typo. It should read “Prices starting at $45/month after that.”

    — Rod Boothby    598 days ago    #

  3. @Rob

    I’m really excited about this. I have developed a facebook application but never wanted to go live with it since I was hosting it on my inexpensive shared-hosting server.

    Now I can :)

    You guys/girls are awesome.

    — Tim    598 days ago    #

  4. I notice that you say you’ve partnered with Dell and that “Accelerators are built on top of servers and storage running OpenSolaris as their operating system…”

    Where’s the usual touting of rock solid Sun hardware? Are we seeing a return to Vulcan here? And, what do Ben and Jason have to say?

    Reference

    — Mike    598 days ago    #

  5. So if my math serve me right, Dell pony’d up 110 servers each having 16 GB of RAM.

    I love SUN but Joyent and DELL made this happen.

    I give props to Dell for doing this.

    — Jim    598 days ago    #

  6. Out of curiosity, are these new Dell servers or are these the old FreeBSD Dell servers Joyent use to run their business on?

    It really doesn’t matter … just curious.

    I think this is a great deal for everyone.

    — Kevin    598 days ago    #

  7. @Kevin, they’re brand new 8 intel CPU, 32GB RAM servers. We don’t ever use servers more than 2 years old for anything.

    — Jason A. Hoffman    598 days ago    #

  8. I understand they are new servers, but are they Dell servers? Which models are they and why would they donate $3.2million worth of equipment?

    — NoHost    597 days ago    #

  9. I am excited about what seems to be a great deal. However, I signed up over 24 hours ago and have not received any information at all. Upon signup, I was promised that I would receive everything in less than 24 hours.

    — Mike Clark    597 days ago    #

  10. @NoHost

    I don’t think Dell donated $3.2 million worth of servers … it’s Joyent donating $3.2 million worth of free service.

    Note that 3,500 (M) Accelerator accounts are being given away for free for 1 year.

    A (M) Accelerator cost $75/mo.

    So: 3,500 account x 12 mo x $75/mo = $3.15 million.

    Dell probably pitched in the 50-60 servers need for all of these accounts to run on.

    — Tim    597 days ago    #

  11. I think they are offering free Accelerators on Sun servers and not on Dell. Dell is just a backup partner in case they run out of capacity on Sun servers.

    — NoHost    597 days ago    #

  12. @Mike Clark

    It does say that developers would be sent their details within 24 hours on the signup page, but as referenced by this post from the Joyent forum I think everyone that got in will receive their welcome email within the next 2 days.

    @NoHost

    It looks pretty clear from the details given that the Facebook Accelerators will indeed be running on Dell servers.

    — J.D. Justice    597 days ago    #

  13. @NoHost: the Facebook Accelerators are on Dell servers.

    @J.D. Justice: I updated the page to note a 72 hour turnaround on the new account setups. Anyone who signed up Tuesday/Wednesday will get theirs by Friday.

    — Kristie Wells    597 days ago    #

  14. Any word if Joyent is using openxVM for the Accelerators?

    http://www.openxvm.org/

    — Frank C.    597 days ago    #

  15. @Frank C: No. We are not using xVM for any Accelerators. We continue to support, and think it superior, Solaris Zones as the basic virtualization technology. We think it is far more stable than Xen. But that’s just my assertion, at this point. We’re working to provide some test data in the near furture. Because we aren’t using xVM today for Accelerators, we’re not ruling out using Xen or VMWare (for that matter) for other types of compute needs (batch, for example).

    — David Young    597 days ago    #

  16. have they hit the 3500 developers yet? I registered on Tuesday and haven’t heard anything yet.

    — steve    594 days ago    #

  17. I got the email about 5 minutes after I posted this

    — steve    594 days ago    #

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