Joyent

100,000 Joyent Accelerators

We just delivered the 100,000th Joyent Accelerator to a customer. That’s a big milestone. Congratulations to the Joyent team. And congratulations to our customers who are doing such interesting things with Joyent Accelerators, everyone from Prince (the artist known as), to all the Facebook developers, to the many enterprise shops removing the barriers of IT from the innovations of smart developers. Onwards to 1,000,000.

Control Yourself

We’re pleased to announce that Control Yourself, Inc. (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), producer of Open Source Twitter alternative Laconica and host of the popular microblogging site identi.ca, launched a private beta of a new microblogging hosting service, status.net. The new service will be hosted on Joyent Accelerators to provide high-availability, highly-scalable microblogging sites to enterprises and Web communities.

“We’re excited to be offering our services based on Joyent’s excellent platform,” said Evan Prodromou, CEO of Control Yourself and founder of the Laconica project. “We’ve really been impressed by Joyent’s ability to meet our specifications and requirements for status.net, and we appreciate their help in designing the architectures and shaping this service.” Prodromou added that Identi.ca, the large microblogging site launched in July 2008, will be the first site moved to the new platform.

Status.net is a new microblogging service that lets anyone set up their own microblogging site, based on Laconica’s functionality. Clients can make private microblogging networks for use by a company or community, or public ones that interface with Twitter, Facebook, and other Laconica-based sites. Control Yourself is accepting applications from enterprises, marketing and publishing organizations, and Web communities to participate in their beta program for the platform they call “status-as-a-service.”

In my opinion, micro-blogging is a resource-intensive site category with very little tolerance for downtime or poor performance. Working with Control Yourself, we have designed a persistent, powerful architecture on the Joyent Cloud that can support microblogging’s high demands. We’re confident that our infrastructure will help Control Yourself satisfy status.net customers.

Welcome to the loving cloud.

Customer Feedback

It’s nice to get great customer feedback:

This weekend, I wrote a humorous piece entitled “Moses is Departing
Egypt: A Facebook Haggaddah.” Not having easy access to any other
hosting service, I stored it on my Joyent Accelerator account. (I am
very glad that your terms of service permit this, so long as my
Facebook application is being tested.) This piece unexpectedly went
viral, and has received over 100,000 visits in the 60 hours since it
was posted. I have been delighted that there have been no problems
associated with my rapid increase in bandwith needs (page loads seem
as fast as ever in informal tests), and even more delighted that this
entire service has been free for me. (In fact, you don’t even have my
credit card number or address.)

Signed: Carl Elkin (creator of “Moses is Departing Egypt: A Facebook Haggaddah”)

You’re welcome, Carl.

Facebook Haggadah on Joyent

We’re pleased that the Facebook Haggadah is running on a free Joyent Accelerator as part of our program for social network developers. The Haggadah is the telling of the events of Passover and the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt as described in the book of Exodus of the Torah. The Haggadah itself is a religious text to be used during the Seder supper to fulfill the scriptural commandment “to tell your son” about Jewish liberation.

I don’t know if the Facebook Haggadah fulfills the scriptural commandment. Those that work with me at Joyent might be able to guess my response, but I won’t hazard an opinion on this blog.

Nevertheless, happy Passover to all. Follow the Facebook Haggadah.

Contestant Winners, Free Social Apps Infrastructure, Upcoming Events

The “Answer Questions about Jason” contest was a success and all the contest winner received a free entry-level Joyent Accelerator. Congratulations. I was proud to give away Accelerators to celebrate the launch of JSBin on Joyent.

Keeping with the free theme, we will be expanding the number of free slots we have open for developers of social networking applications (thanks to Sun and the Sun Startup Essentials partnerships). We plan to accommodate the entire waiting list for the Facebook, Bebo and Opensocial programs. We look forward to seeing many more great applications developed on Joyent.

The marketing team at Joyent has been very busy. Here’s a list of upcoming events Joyeurs will be attending:

• Free Software Foundation LibrePlanet, Boston, March 21-22
• Green:Net 2009, San Francisco, March 24
• Cloud Expo, New York, March 30-April 1
• IT360, Toronto, April 8
• JSConf, Arlington, Virginia, April 24-25

Hope to see you out there.

Light-weight, Collaborative Javascript Debugging: JS Bin on Joyent Accelerators

JS Bin is a very useful utility offering collaborative JavaScript debugging. From the About section:

JS Bin allows you to edit and test JavaScript and HTML (reloading the URL also maintains the state of your code – new tabs doesn’t). Once you’re happy you can save, and send the URL to a peer for review or help. They can then make further changes saving anew if required.

At Joyent we’re pleased to be offering the cloud infrastructure for JS Bin. We have high hopes for the future of JavaScript both on the client and the server.

To celebrate JS Bin on Joyent Accelerators we will give away five one-year subscriptions to entry-level Accelerators to people that answer one of the following five questions:

1) What place did Jason Hoffman come in for the Joyent 2007 weight loss contest? Jason came in ___________.
2) Please provide a URL to pictures showing Jason Hoffman before/after his tremendous weight gain? URL: _________________.
3) Much of Jason Hoffman’s earlier weight gain came from eating ____________.
4) Jason Hoffman’s current weight is _____________.
5) Jason Hoffman smokes ___________ packs of cigarettes daily.

You can answer questions in the comments. The first one to answer a question correctly will win an Accelerator. One win per player. No Joyent employees, thanks.

Update: congratulations to all the winners. Contest done. Prizes will be sent out soon.

Update: all Prizes have been sent to the winners

Scalable Traffic Direction and Load Balancing in the "Cloud" with Zeus and Joyent

Last night Zeus and Joyent announced the offering of ZXTM inside Zeus accelerators.

There are some interesting things to note about the offering, the relationship and how the Zeus accelerators work. It also marks the beginning of networked “appliances” being offered at Joyent and a new delivery mechanism and model for Zeus.

Zeus, as you may know, produced one of the better performing web servers and now has the only traffic direction solution that’s offered as software and would be considered “enterprise grade”. As an enterprise grade load-balancer/traffic manager, it’s typically sold and distributed like most enterprise software. ZXTM as offered at Joyent is a new way for software makers like Zeus to ship and sell software, and we’re excited that they trusted us with it. It’s definitely the most accessible and cost-effective way to get ZXTM.

As a fairly regular topic on this blog, we’ve noted that traffic direction is the key to any scalable architecture: HTTP is a stateless protocol (its scale is inherently horizontal) and a domain name requires a relatively small set of IP addresses in the front. There is state then in the IP address and scale requires linking those few front-end IP addresses (e.g. 2-3) with tens to thousands and perhaps back to tens of back-end application nodes. That’s where products like F5’s BIG-IPs and Zeus ZXTM come into play. One is a hardware solution and the other is software.

We’re only offering the full ZXTM, to keep things simple, and everything is basically available within normal accelerator pricing (you bought 2x $500 accelerators before and now they’re a ZXTM cluster). The clustered accelerators provide each customer with an independent and isolated ZXTM setup, complete access to the ZXTM management interface and API, and unprecedented access to network and traffic metrics.

Also a “developer version” of ZXTM will be showing up as standard package in all of our future accelerators. The developer version won’t do all the clustering, in-memory caching, failover and multi-node stuff but Zeus has been kind enough to provide all of us with what is otherwise a feature complete software stack. This will allow anyone to investigate the API, use it on single accelerators and get an idea of the kinds of information and metrics that you can get out of Zeus’s management interface.

For the paid Zeus Accelerators, they’re only available as at least redundant pairs and there are no limitations on the number of backend accelerators or clustering (except the normal practical limits). It took some work for this type of network failover to work within the Joyent cloud (and as far as I know, we’re the only ones that can securely do it). We feel that if you actually need these then they should always be VLAN’ed and clustered, and that is the only way we’re selling them. You can scale your Zeus Accelerators by just adding more memory and CPU power, and their scale is really driven by how much you have to cache in-memory.

With the ability to load-balance and direct gigabits per second now completely in the hands of our customers (and at a moment’s notice), we’re working hard to add more and more unique “functional” accelerators to the mix and in many cases, like ZXTM, they’ll be available as larger, complex and more interesting setups and packages.

So let’s welcome Zeus to the family and Happy Traffic Directing everyone.

Joyent Acquires Reasonably Smart

I’m very excited to announce that Joyent has acquired the Montreal-based Reasonably Smart platform. James Duncan and Bryan Bogensberger, founders of the company and platform, have joined Joyent.

This acquisition comes at an important point in time for Joyent. We’ve just finished our best year, ever. Revenue doubled in 2008 from 2007 even as the economy continues to tank. Customers are moving spend from cap-ex to op-ex and Joyent products are ideally situated for this trend. However, more and more customers are expecting auto-scale from their cloud vendors and this acquisition allows Joyent to respond to those demands.

Reasonably Smart is an auto-scaling platform-as-a-service; it is a direct, open-source competitor to Google App Engine. We believe the future of cloud computing is found in open, transparent platforms that allow customers to move between clouds easily, if desired. Unfortunately, that is not the case for most cloud vendors today. This acquisition underscores Joyent’s commitment to customers and their interests in cloud computing.

This acquisition also underscores a bet that Javascript will become the language of scale for the web. When I talk of scale, I don’t only mean “big” but also “very small” since most applications developed are used by a handful of people from time-to-time. The platform will support other languages in the coming months, but we feel confident that Javascript is a very competent first start.

I want to welcome James Duncan and Bryan Bogensberger to Joyent. James will continue to develop the platform. He has been a champion and contributor of open source for many years and has experience in building platforms at enormous scale. Bryan will be serving as Joyent’s VP of Marketing. Jason Hoffman and I knew they both were great fits for Joyent since they like to have fun and they are passionate about doing what is right for customers.

The Reasonably Smart platform is off-line for a couple months while we integrate it with Joyent backend services. Meanwhile, please sign up at http://reasonablysmart.com (running on Joyent Accelerators) to allow us to keep you informed of progress.

Joyent Accelerator 2.1.4 Release

It’s with excitement that I announce the newest version of the Joyent Accelerator. The Joyent Technology team deserves a round of applause for their diligent work on this latest version of the Accelerator template. It is a tremendous piece of technology, and I certainly tip my hat to the team and say thank you, as both a client and an employee. To that end, I wanted to write a brief overview to explain a bit more about what an Accelerator is, what it comes with, and some of the ways Joyent customers use them.

What is a Joyent Accelerator?

Joyent Accelerators are virtual servers based on the OpenSolaris Nevada operating system, but imbued with more friendly GNU userland tools and the PKGSRC packaging system. Joyent Accelerators are the ideal building blocks for serious work at serious scale. You can start small and grow big on-demand. Web 2.0 Developers, SaaS, and PaaS providers enjoy the ease of use and simplicity of the Joyent ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) Cloud. The enterprise-class technology stack that surrounds an Accelerator, which we call a Pod, is comprised of routers, firewalls, load balancer, networks, high speed internet connections, switches, remote access, and much more. By embedding our virtual servers in this core technology stack, Accelerators enable extreme computing and scalability at the level necessary for today’s online applications. This allows developers and service providers to focus primarily on the application, reduce total cost of ownership, and add ‘agile’ to the words used to describe the IT arsenal your business brings to the table.

Moreover, all Accelerators come with the built-in support of a tremendous pkgsrc repository of over 600 packages! We work hard on these packages to help you keep your systems up-to-date, easy to build and deploy. There are probably thousands of cumulative Systems Administrator hours put into this, which you get by default just for being a Joyent Accelerator customer.

What Frameworks or Programming Languages can I use on a Joyent Accelerator?

Most existing frameworks and languages run very well on Joyent Accelerators. A Joyent Accelerator can easily run the most demanding applications written in Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Erlang. A partial list of the frameworks we have personally tested or know to work well are:

Tomcat, Gigaspaces XAP, Axiom Stack, GlassFish, CakePHP, Symfony, Drupal, Django, Merb, Ruby on Rails, CouchDB, .NET in mono, Ejabberd, SunGridEngine, and more. You can find how-to guides and installation information for all of these and more on our wiki at http://wiki.joyent.com.

What are people doing with their Accelerators?

Here are some recent examples of ways our clients are using Joyent Acclerators:

We have what is likely one of the largest Drupal installations anywhere. It has been tested to run at upwards of 1000 req/sec! That’s 2.5 billion page views per month!

The recent launch of Aptana Cloud powered by Joyent’s IaaS was an exciting step as well. Aptana cloud compute nodes launch in about 45 seconds and cost as little as $0.04 per hour.

Static asset clusters using BigIP and Nginx that easily serve 2000 req/sec per node and more, and can scale nearly linearly with the addition of our managed load balancing services. These are frequently used to augment dynamic web sites.

Large scale ejabberd installation that runs for Major League Baseball live chat during games.

A Symfony site serving as many as 12,000 SELECT queries per second and huge numbers of HTTP requests for a large application that has been successfully handling the substantial bursts of activity during the recent presidential campaign debates.

A distributed java application development platform with Gigaspaces XAP on Joyent. This makes developing and deploying distributed cloud computing applications a breeze.

Sun Grid Engine working out traditional HPC work loads on-demand in our environment.

Summary

We are excited about this new release and so are our early release clients and beta testers. The Accelerator is a tremendously flexible IaaS offering, that has customers saying things such as:

“The new template is so fully configured that pretty much everything that had been causing me issues is now just installed by default.” -Client

“I really like it as it is full of the latest and greatest stuff ready to be used. Really cool!” -Client

“Only thought I had for you was that it’s nice that the accelerator comes with subversion, bzr, mercurial, and git, along with enough ruby gems to choke a horse (including both merb and camping).” -Client

“Congrats for the release. I’m sure your clients will love it. I do ;-)” -Beta Tester

Joyent Accelerator 2.1.4 (aka 2008Q2) Release Notes:

Here is a list of the highlights of this release. I’m sure there is more that I missed, but this gives a good idea.

MySQL 5.0.67
Apache 2.2.9
Memcached 1.2.6
Merb 0.9.2
Nginx 0.6.32
Perl 5.8.8
PHP 5.2.6
Phusion Passenger (mod_rails)
Ruby on Rails 2.1.2
Subversion 1.5
Git 1.5.6.4
RugyGems 1.2.0
Erlang 12.0nb2
Python 2.5.2
PostgreSQL 8.3.3
Postgrey 1.31 Postfix 2.5.5
Varnish 1.1.2
Ejabberd 2.0.0nb2
GraphicsMagick 1.2.4
ImageMagick 6.3.6.1
Java 1.6.0_06
Mono 1.9
SpamAssassin 3.2.5
Build a Boost (boost-libs) package
cmake package for use by hypertable and kfs
Cleaned Up a lot of orphaned SMF services
Fixed a postscript SMF restart bug
Upgrade Virtualmin to 3.62
Disable mod_fcgid out of the box
Update ruby to fix a vulnerability
Update MySQL to fix vulnerability
Update RMagick to 2.7.0
Create a package for the fastthread gem
Enable Phusion Passenger for use on Joyent
Fixed a Python Symlink issue
Upgraded Rails to 2.1.1
Upgraded Mongrel to 1.1.5
Upgraded Rake to 0.8.2
Upgraded RMagic to 2.6.0
Upgraded Ruby Hoe to 1.7.0
Updated RedCloth
Added Accelerator version info to MOTD banner on shell login
Several Email-related improvements
Postgrey 1.31
Spamassassin 3.2.5
Update to PHP PDO
Fixed an Eventmachine Dependency Issue
Improvements to Nginx
Added PHP-Tidy
Updated Ruby to 1.8.7
Improved mysql SMF scripts
Add several extras for Merb users
memcached and PHP5 updates
Increased the default file descriptor limit out of the box
fixed some log rotation issues
MySQL slow query log on by default
A large number of updates related to making Elrang Apps run better out of the box

[Update: a review http://www.agileweboperations.com/review-joyent-accelerator-21-beta]

Joyent Opens Seattle Office

We recently opened a Seattle office as a move to consolidate Joyent’s distributed development efforts with something concentrated in a specific place. You can read more about it here. Ben Black, recently of Microsoft, joins Joyent as VP, Research to help lead the efforts. Jason is moving up to Seattle as well.

Much more could be said about our decision to consolidate development in a single place. The tax imposed by a distributed team is heavy. We aren’t moving all our developers to Seattle, but we are committing to establishing a core.