Joyent

Codesnippets: A Place to Share Code

We’ve recently moved Textsnippets to Codesnippets and gave it a big face lift. Codesnippets is a place for developers to share code, solutions to problems, tutorials, techniques. And it is free.

Buy Denim, Save on Accelerators

Now when you buy high-quality denim and other clothing at August (in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland), you can save on Joyent Accelerators. Your purchase of US$200 or more at August and will earn a discount of 10% off your Accelerator charges for one month.

Joyent's Garden of Eden for Python Web Applications

Joyent is pleased to announce our “Garden of Eden” program offering free infrastructure for high-volume python web applications. If your python web application has 25,000 or more unique visitors every month, Joyent’s “Garden of Eden” program provides you, the python application developer, with unlimited on-demand compute, storage, memory, bandwidth for your python application (besides the nude, and buffed people everywhere). Joyent only asks that you provide Joyent unlimited access to your customer information and clickstream data. Grow your python application to 1,000,000 monthly uniques, all the infrastructure you need to run your application is on us. All we ask for is unlimited access to your customer information and clickstream data. This is no joke. We’re serious. Angel with a flaming sword guarding the garden serious.

Interested parties can get started by contacting Joyent’s developer concierge at playersclub [at] joyent [dot] com.

Update

A large number of people have contacted me asking if this offer is a shot at Google’s App Engine. It is not. Google’s App Engine Beta offers applications “500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day”. I don’t know what a “megacycle” is. Is it one thousand cycles? So that’s 200 million thousand? Anyways. Joyent believes these restrictions will allow a Python application to serve up to 25,000 uniques a months. From the website we read: “We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month”. That’s about 200 page views per user per month. Your mileage may vary. However, our offer is designed to allow the enterprising Python developer to continue to build a great website business on free infrastructure without the restrictions. Think of Joyent’s Garden of Eden as graduate school. Or the “real world”.

Reminder: Joyent IRC Channel

Many of us at Joyent hang out in an open IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (#joyent). Anyone is welcome to come by and chat.

Free Accelerators for OpenSocial Developers

Joyent is pleased to announce 1024 free Accelerators for OpenSocial developers. The first OpenSocial participating social network we are supporting is hi5. We will be supporting additional OpenSocial social networks in the coming weeks and months. We will also expand the program in the coming weeks to keep up with demand. Unfortunately, demand sometimes outruns supply. Thanks, in advance, for your patience.

OpenSocial provides a single platform for developers to create applications that will ultimately run on a wide variety of social networking websites including hi5, Bebo, MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo.

Joyent Accelerators for OpenSocial developers provide a great place to begin development of a social networking application. We’ve optimized the Accelerators with the libraries needed for Rails, Python, Java, and PHP development.

You can sign up here. We are looking forward to seeing all the innovation and ingenuity express by developers.

Joyent Supports Free Software

Joyent recently became a patron of the Free Software Foundation joining the likes of Google, IBM, Sun, Nokia, HP, EMC. Joyent believes that in the coming cloud computing world the long-term value of software, as a fungible asset, goes to zero (quickly). Joyent provides value by providing working infrastructure for our software. And that’s what we charge for, when we charge.

Understanding where Joyent provides value led us to open source (as in free software) a number of Joyent projects last year (Connector, Slingshot, Ruby Dtrace probes). These projects can be accessed here. We also run Textsnippets a small, but growing developer community for solving code problems through sharing free software.

It’s interesting to me that Web 2.0 has been built, almost exclusively, on a foundation of free software. The foundation is free, many times the service offered is free, but rarely is the code for the service itself free. That’s a new wine/old wineskins approach that won’t last long. Why? It is inefficient. And bad for business. Your software can easily be copied (view source) and cloned. Wordpress.com is free software. Even the multi-blog version is free software. That’s not where Automattic makes money. Not on software. The money is in the service.

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to contribute to Google Calendar and make it better? Or, from another angle, does someone having the code to Google Calendar make them a threat to Google’s ability to sell advertising? Or Google Apps? No. The value Google brings is in the cloud computer service (more properly, the software-as-a-service computer). All cloud software should be free. Users should be able to contribute (and borrow). This is how your software has influence. You want developer eyeballs.

We’re proud, at Joyent, to be supporting the Free Software Foundation. We’ve created t-shirts to celebrate the occasion. This is the design on the front.

click for larger version

Very inside baseball. We have a limited number for sale. Please contact Kristie [at] joyent [dot] com. Proceeds will go towards taking staff at the FSF out for drinks next time someone from Joyent is in Boston. As in free beer.

Joyent Supports hi5 and Open Social

Joyent will be providing free Accelerators, optimized for Open Social at this coming Saturday’s (March 15th) bi-national hack-a-thon. The day-long hi5 hackathon will bring together over 200 commercial, independent and student developers, who will code new hi5 applications, socialize and share their work from two locations in the U.S. and Mexico: the Google Campus in Mountain View, California; and the Campus Estado de Mexico of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM). Joining the developers will be representatives of hi5, Google, Globant, ITESM, and Joyent.

By supporting OpenSocial, a simple and practical set of open technologies, hi5 and Joyent encourage developers to build innovative applications on frictionless, on-demand infrastructure.

Working with hi5 introduces developers to millions of users they are able to reach more easily with the OpenSocial APIs. Working with Joyent allows developers to reach hi5 scale with little worry.

For the first 100 new apps that are approved for the hi5 Platform launch, the associated developers will win one year of scalable, on-demand architecture on a Joyent Accelerator™. Additionally, hi5 will provide Spanish or English translation for these apps as well. For detailed information on the hi5 Developer Program, please visit their website.

We’re very excited to be working with hi5 and Google on this launch. If you’re near either location, please come down and hack(-a-thon).

Joyeur Meetup, 2008

We’re having our annual company-wide Joyent meetup. I’ll be doing regular QIK short interview with individual Joyeurs. You can follow when a QIK broadcast is going by following me on Twitter. I’m davidpaulyoung on QIK.

Also, we’ll be podcasting with a QuadCore session with a number on Joyeurs. Please leave a comment here if you’d like me to track down a Joyeur and ask them a question.

Update: QIK is an alpha service. Seems other content from other users of the service are leaking onto my channel. Funny, though.

Twitter and Joyent: Update

Twitter has been officially off Joyent since 10PM last night. This may come as a surprise to some after yesterday’s posts here and here regarding the two companies working together. Those of us at Joyent appreciate the opportunity we had to work with the talented folks at Twitter. It is a great service. We wish Twitter every continued success.

As I mentioned yesterday, Joyent is standing ready with excess free infrastructure to support Twitter through this transition in the event that they need it.

Billions Served: Joyent Accelerators a Real Platform for Growth

Mark Mayo of Joyent gave a presentation yesterday evening at a Facebook developer garage in Vancouver, Canada. One statistic from his presentation really stands out. Joyent provides on-demand infrastructure for one application serving nearly one billion page views per month. One billion. Moreover, the infrastructure cost for that application is just over $10K per month. And, if the fickle desires of Facebook users turn away from this customer, they aren’t tied down to a contract. We help people scale up, and scale down.

As Rod said in an earlier post, Joyent is powering 11% of Facebook application usage and growing rapidly. Joyent can do this because the Joyeurs have built a real, open protocol, open standards, professional cloud computer. We have hardware load balancers and high-end routers capable of driving billions of page views across our entire network every month.

I am really proud of what the Joyeurs have accomplished. Congratulations.

P.S. the application is a Rails app. I think these facts put to bed any issues regarding Rails and scaling.

(Photo and blog quote from: Miss 604)