Joyent

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.

Why Joyent Banned all Employees from Attending South-by-Southwest Interactive This Year

We have been asked a number of times whether Joyent is going to the South-by-Southwest Interactive (aka SXSW) festival this year. The answer is “no”. All Joyent employees are, in fact, banned from SXSW for the following lucky seven reasons:

1) Drinking. There is lots and lots of drinking of alcoholic beverages. I think this is the most important thing to understand about SXSW. Lots and lots of drinking. Joyent co-sponsored the 16-bit party last year (I think they’re calling it 32-bit this year, haha, get the joke?) and I remember standing in this junk yard (the location of the party) being shocked while hundreds of people were jumping the fences to get into the party to: drink. Lots and lots. Then we got into these bicycle-drawn-carts and rode around in the dark. I couldn’t believe that ride cost $180. Seems high. Then I’m on an outside patio and there’s John Gruber and his lovely wife Melissa and they’re both talking about pixels. Too much. It just went on and on.

2) BBQ. As a native Texan (Dallas, 1966), I makes me sick to hear Yankees (non-Texans) talk about Bar-B-Que. Believe me, that is about all ya’ll hear about during SXSW when ya’ll not drinking and drinking. “Oh, we went to Salt Lick and had BBQgasm.” No self-respecting Texan talks like that. In fact, only the folks that moved to Texas from New Jersey go to the Salt Lick. I don’t care what Matt Mullenweg says. The “good food” in Texas is found in the back yard of someone’s house and only I and a few other folks know where to find it. If the SXSW crowd is there, well, I need a drink.

3) Social media. Be careful, we’re still on solid ground, but if you actually go to any of the presentations at SXSW you will tumble right into rapturous discussions of “starting the conversation” which is difficult to get excited about after all that drinking. So you’re sitting there in the audience and someone is going on about “bizarre versus convention center” when, I swear you look around and you realize you’re smack dab in the middle of…

4) San Francisco. What a pathetic excuse of a city. On almost all the levels and altitudes. It is no New York on the west coast. That would be Los Angeles. I can only repeat what my daughter recently said when I asked if she wanted to drive around San Francisco. “No, let’s go to the airport.” Amen. I need a drink.

5) Muxtape. If you aren’t already using Muxtape, I beg/urge you to get over there right now. However, if Muxtape were to break out during SXSW (Interactive AND Music), I don’t know that we could be so enthusiastic. Muxtape right now is like that silly little bar in the Bowery. We don’t want people streaming in from New Jersey muxing it all up. I have a bad feeling about this.

6) More than the “One Accelerator”? Microsoft, you’re got to be kidding. There is only one Accelerator.

7) Austin. Finally, Austin the city and its environs. This may seem a strange reason to ban Joyent employees from SXSW. Don’t get me wrong. I personally love Austin. It is a wonderful city with rich cultural, and historic offerings. My brother went to the University of Texas. Hook’em horns and all that. You can visit a French embassy to the Republic of Texas in Austin. Nice. But let’s face it. Austin is not Texas. It is cartoon Texas. I wouldn’t want to saddle New Jersey with Newark any more than I want to saddle Texas, and Joyent employees’ understanding of Texas, with Austin.

Maybe one day Joyent will be back at South-by-Southwest Interactive. I’m sure that will be the year before it winds down.

Joyent Official Sponsor of the Django Dash Competiton

Django Dash is a chance for Django enthusiasts to flex their coding skills a little and produce a killer application within 48 hours. Of course, they want you to have a little fun in the process.

We here at Joyent loves ‘the Django’, and are happy to support the competition that officially kicks off this Saturday, May 31st. We will be awarding the winning teams with a shiny new Accelerator so they have somewhere snazzy to put that winning application once the contest is over.

Keep a watch over at the contest site, and we can’t wait to see what the teams are able to kick out in such a short amount of time.

Good luck!

Cloud Nine: Specification for a Cloud Computer. A Call to Action.

What is cloud computing? We recently asked a number of people in our industry, and got back a range of interesting, and sometimes self-referential, responses. You can see them here. According to our respondents, cloud computing means anything from a single-tenant, multi-user application cloud (also known as software-as-a-service or “Saas”) to multi-tenant, general purpose, on-demand clouds (sometimes called platform-as-a-service or “PaaS”). Joyent provides an example of the former in our Connector product. We also do the latter in our Accelerator product.

I think the world of computing, generally, is moving away from a do-it-yourself approach to accomplish “shared” computing (and by computing is meant anything having to do with servers, in general) towards embracing or, better, stepping into the cloud for most computing the isn’t on the edge of the network. The migration has begun from dedicated, collocated servers to the cloud. Buyers don’t want to take possession of servers, routers, switches, network drops, racks; they want this from the cloud.

But what is the cloud?

What sort of cloud computer(s) should we be building or expecting from vendors? Are there issues of lock-in that should concern customers of either SaaS clouds or PaaS clouds? I’ve been thinking about this problem as the CEO of a PaaS cloud computing company for some time. Clouds should be open. They shouldn’t be proprietary. More broadly, I believe no vendor currently does everything that’s required to serve customers well. What’s required for such a cloud? I think an ideal PaaS cloud would have the following nine features:

1) Virtualization Layer Network Stability

Cloud computers must operate on some sort of virtualization technology for many of the following features to even be feasible. But as general purpose computing moves from dedicated hardware to on-demand computing, one key feature of the dedicated model for web applications is a stable, static IP address. If the virtualization layer borks (and this happens), when the cloud has recovered the cloud instances of compute, the developer should be able to rely on the web application just working without having to re-jigger network settings.

2) API for Creation, Deletion, Cloning of Instances

Developers should be able to interact with the cloud computer, to do business with it, without having to get on the phone with a sales person, or submit a help ticket. In other words, the customer should be able to truly get on-demand computing when they demand, whenever they demand. Joyent only began to offer this recently through Aptana and their Aptana Studio product. However, the API is only available to Aptana at this point. The API needs to be publicly available to everyone. Provide a credit card (that works and is yours) and you should get compute, storage, and RAM on-demand. The challenges for cloud computing companies is to figure the just-in-time economics that allow us to provide on-demand infrastructure without having lots of infrastructure sitting around waiting to be used. I think this means that cloud computing companies will, just like banks, begin more and more to “loan” each other infrastructure to handle our own peaks and valleys, But in order for this to happen we’d need the next requirement.

3) Application Layer Interoperability

Cloud computers need to support a core set of application frameworks in a consistent way. I propose that cloud computers should support PHP, Ruby, Python, Java and the most common frameworks, libraries, gems/plugins, and application/web servers for each of these languages. Essentially, a developer should be able to move between Joyent, the Amazon Web Services, Google, Mosso, Slicehost, GoGrid, etc. by simply pointing the “deploy gun” at the cloud (having used the API mentioned above to spin up instances) and go. Change DNS, done. But, no cloud computing company is innovating by providing better application layer solutions. We ought to support the most popular languages and move on. However, for a developer to truly have cloud portability, we need to support another requirement.

4) State Layer Interoperability

This is the most difficult problem to solve when scaling a web application, and, consequently, the area in which cloud computing companies are innovating while sacrificing interoperability. It’s not simply a question of deciding that we should all support MySQL or Postgres because we will find that the needed requirement (“Automatic Scaling”) is practically impossible to achieve with these tools. Amazon is innovating with SimpleDB, Google has BigTable as solutions for the problem, but developers can’t leave either cloud because neither SimpleDB nor BigTable are available anywhere else. What is needed, and I’m looking ahead to the next requirement when I say this, is an XMPP-based state-layer that can flush out to some SQL-y store. Think open-source Tibco. The financial markets fixed these problems years ago. This datastore needs to speak SQL, be built using open-source and free software, and be easy for developers to adopt. The value cloud computing companies provide to developers is running the state layer for them, without requiring developers to use some proprietary state layer that may or may not provide scalability upon success and represents lock-in.

5) Application Services (e.g. email infrastructure, payments infrastructure)

A cloud computer should provide scaled application services consumable by developers in developing and delivering their own applications. There are two types of application services. The first group is delivered using open protocols/formats. Examples would be IMAP/SMTP, LDAP/vCARD, iCAL/ICS, XMPP, OpenID, OPML. All clouds should offer these open protocols/formats so that developers can move between clouds without having to rewrite their application. The second group is delivered as web services, are often proprietary to the cloud (therefore a means of differentiation), and include services such as payments, inventory.

6) Automatic Scale (deploy and forget about it)

All things being equal, a competent developer should be able to deploy to a cloud and grow to five billion page views a month without having to think about “scale”. Just write the code, the cloud computer does the rest.

Is this achievable? Today, no. No cloud computer automatically scales applications. Part of the problem lies in the state layer. Part of the problem lies in what it means to scale. What is the measure of scale? Responsiveness? Scaling the state layer (e.g. the database) is a black art. Scaling the application layer or the static assets layer relies, in part on load balancing and storage.

7) Hardware Load Balancing

The cloud computer should provide the means to achieve five billion page views a month. I picked that number because it is big. If you’re writing an application, and you want to be able to achieve tremendous scale, the answer shouldn’t be to move off the cloud onto your own “private” cloud of dedicated servers. Of course, if the cloud computer is open as we’ve described, you can build your own cloud. It’s also true you can generate your own electricity from coal, if you want to bother. But why bother? Software load balancers will get you nowhere close to the throughput required to achieve 5 billion page views per month. The state of the art is hardware load balancers.

8) Storage as a Service

Storage should be available to developers as a service. Where this is done today, it is done using a proprietary API and represents lock-in. The storage service should allow customers to consume endless amounts of storage and pay for only what is used. Objects on the storage service should be accessed by developers as objects rather than as nodes in a hierarchical tree. This way developers don’t have to understand the hierarchy.

WebDAV could be an open protocol version of the storage service, but fails to provide the abstraction of treating objects as objects rather than nodes in a hierarchical tree. At present, I don’t believe there is a reasonable solution to the problem that isn’t also proprietary. We need to develop one that is open and free.

9) “Root”, If Required

The cloud computer vendor can’t think of everything a developer or application might need or want to do. So the cloud needs to be hackable and extensible by the developer and that means an administrative account of some sort that allows the developer to shape and mold the cloud to their specific needs. By definition, cloud computers must be built on top of some sort of virtualization technology, so the developer never has “root” to the cloud, only “root” to the developer’s part of the cloud.

Operating Systems Don’t Matter for Cloud Computing

People often confuse the “userland” with the operating system. An operating system provides the means for the userland to interact with hardware. The userland, especially in a (virtual) server context is “where stuff lives”. Where is the document root for Apache? Where do plug-ins get installed?

At Joyent, we use Solaris Express as the basis for our distribution of Solaris. It has a radically simplified userland designed for web applications, not for laptop computers, graphical user interfaces, mp3 libraries. Developers care about the userland, not the operating system. Wouldn’t it be great if you logged into your cloud and you saw:

/code
/frameworks
/binaries

How do we extend this so that the cloud is entirely “RESTful” and everything is just a URI? :)

The choice of the operating system (and the consequent virtualization technology) is critical to the cloud computing service provider. Whether we choose Solaris Zones or Xen or VMWare ESX or Linux KVM or Windows Server 2008 tells you about the ability of the cloud computer to scale reliably. Developers should care about the choices their cloud computing vendor makes because it speaks, in part, to the ability of the cloud to scale. But for using the cloud, deploying an application, it makes no difference.

Business Models

I’ve left aside talking about the business model of a cloud computer, since that is best left up to the vendor. The issues of whether there are contracts or not, whether one can pay with a credit card, is there hourly or monthly billing, these things don’t matter for the definition of a cloud computer. It is in these areas that vendors can innovate and differentiate.

Introducing CloudScore

The nine factors that make up a cloud computer can be applied by you, the buyer, to any cloud computer out there to determine a “CloudScore”.

Joyent’s Accelerator offering currently scores a CloudScore of 7 out of 9. We are working hard to achieve a Cloud 9.

Triathlon Experience with Fellow Joyeurs

This past Sunday four of us from Joyent (and one wife) participated in a sprint distance triathlon (half mile swim, 15 mile bike, 4 mile run) at Lake Berryessa east of Napa valley. We all finished. We all had a great experience. Some of the experiences included getting into the cold lake water at 8 in the morning with 125 other people in our wave (there were five waves) and immediately thinking a horrible mistake had been made. Oh, this is what the sinking of the Titanic must have been like, from a participant perspective. To finally getting the rhythm of the swim. Riding like a banshee on the bike. Getting off the bike and not being able to bend over to put on running shoes. And then 4.0 miles. 3.94 miles. 3.93. 3.92. 3.915. The view of the finish line was lubricant for sore muscles and achy joints. The manhattan that night, even better.

We all extend congratulations to Linka Watridge, the wife of our CFO Peter Watridge, on her winning time bettering all of us by more than three minutes.

click for larger version

From l to r: Rod Boothby, Peter Watridge, David Young, Blake Burris

Peter won the bet, if you care.

Joyent Developer Days: Proposed Cities

We are working on a series of one-day developer events to be held around the U.S. (to start*), that will include seminars and plenty of opportunities to hack on a few things.

The day itself will vary in format from location to location, but the goal is the same: bring the Joyent developer community closer together, provide the tools you need to build a successful web application and meet some fun people in the process.

We’ll be posting more details on the sessions as we finalize them, right now, we are curious as to what cities YOU feel we should absolutely visit. I have a list of 16 cities on our white board right now, I would like to bring that number down to 5 for the launch.

Click here to take survey

*Once the first five cities are under our belt, we will look at expanding the U.S. list based on your replies, and hopefully hopping the pond to visit our European friends as well as those down under.

UPDATE: 5/6/08

The five cities, leading by a mile, are: San Francisco Bay Area, Washington DC, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Austin.

I am going to leave the poll open through Friday, May 9th at 5pm PST and will post the results next Monday with proposed dates. If your city is not one of the five listed, vote now.

Click here to take survey

Enlace de Suramérica con las Hackathons OpenSocial

Joyent se ha aliado con Google, MySpace, hi5, Vostu, Sonico, Globant, Mentez y Adobe para el Tour Latinoamérica de OpenSocial para ayudar a los desarrolladores a iniciarse con OpenSocial y explicar el potencial de OpenSocial a los mercaderistas en Argentina y Brasil.

Los eventos listados a continuación son de gratuita asistencia y consistirán en hackathons, competencias de desarolladores y eventos corporativos que toman lugar desde Abril 28 hasta Mayo 10.

Argentina

Jason Hoffman se dirige hacia Argentina para las charlas técnicas que serán dadas en diferentes universidades y estará hablando sobre ‘Cloud Computing’ el Viernes 2 de Mayo a las 4:30pm [ver abajo].

Agenda:

• Lunes Abril 28 de 5pm a 7pm: Charla Técnica en UNICEN, Tandil
• Martes Abril 29 de 7pm a 10pm: Redes Sociales para Mercaderistas, Bahrein (Lavalle 345)
• Miércoles Abril 30 de 5pm a 7pm: Charla Técnica en ITBA
• Miércoles Abril 30 de 7:30pm a 9:30pm: Charla Técnica en UTN
• Viernes Mayo 2 de 1pm a 3pm: Charla Técnica en UADE
• Viernes Mayo 2 de 4:30pm a 6:30pm: Charla Técnica de Joyent, Cloud Computing UCEMA*
• Viernes Mayo 2 de 7pm a 9pm: Charla Técnica en UBA, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas
• Sábado Mayo 3 de 9am a 6pm: Hackathon OpenSocial, Parque Técnico Globant (Costa Salguero)

Más información y registro

Brasil

David Young estará para los talleres y seminarios que tomarán lugar del 5 al 11 de Mayo en Porto Alegre, Campinhas y Sao Paulo. Estos talleres están enfocados en ayudar a los desarrolladores a crear aplicaciones e integrarlas con Orkut, Sonico, MySpace, Vostu y otras redes sociales usando la plataforma OpenSocial.

Agenda:

• Mayo 5 App Camp en Porto Alegre (en la tarde): Campus Universitario
• Mayo 6 App Camp en Campinhas (en la tarde): Campus Universitario
• Mayo 7 App Camp en Sao Paulo (en la tarde): Campus Universitario
• Mayo 8, de 4pm a 8pm: Cumbre de la Red Social, Hotel Sonesta Ibirapuera (Sao Paulo)

Más información y registro disponible en el website de Mentez

Para tener una idea del ambiente en Hackathons OpenSocial anteriores, puedes ver este video hecho por Clive Boulton de Silicon Valley Web Builders.

Jason y David estarán disponibles para cocteles locales, quiero decir encuentros locales, así que si estás interesado en salir con ellos por favor deja un comentario aquí y estarán en contacto contigo para más detalles.

Gracias a Andrés Rodríguez por la traducción al español.

————————-

IN ENGLISH:

South America bound with OpenSocial Hackathons

Joyent has partnered with Google, MySpace, hi5, Vostu, Sonico, Globant, Mentez, and Adobe for the OpenSocial Latin America Tour to help developers get started with OpenSocial, and to explain the potential of OpenSocial to Marketers in Argentina and Brazil.

The events listed below are free to attend and will consist of hackathons, developer contests and corporate events taking place from April 28th to May 10th.

Argentina

Jason Hoffman is headed to Argentina for the Tech Talks to be held at different universities and will be speaking on ‘Cloud Computing’ Friday, May 2nd at 4:30 [see below].

Schedule:

• Monday, April 28th from 5pm to 7pm: Tech Talk in UNICEN, Tandil.
• Tuesday, April 29th from 7pm to 10pm: Social Networks for Marketers, Bahrein (Lavalle 345)
• Wednesday, April 30th, from 5pm to 7pm: Tech Talk in ITBA
• Wednesday, April 30th, from 7:30pm to 9:30pm: Tech Talk in UTN
• Friday, May 2nd, from 1pm to 3pm: Tech Talk in UADE
• Friday, May 2nd, from 4:30pm to 6:30pm: Joyent Tech Talk, Cloud Computing UCEMA
• Friday, May 2nd, from 7pm to 9pm: Tech Talk in UBA, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas
• Saturday, May 3rd, from 9am to 6pm: OpenSocial Hackathon, Globant Tech Park (Costa Salguero)

More information and registration

Brazil

David Young will be on hand for the workshops and seminars taking place May 5-11 in Porto Alegre, Campinhas, and Sao Paulo. These workshops are focusing on helping developers create the applications, and integrate them with Orkut, Sonico, Myspace, Vostu and other social networks using the OpenSocial Platform.

Schedule:

• May 5th App Camp in Porto Alegre (afternoon): University Campus
• May 6th App Camp in Campinhas (afternoon): University Campus
• May 7th App Camp in Sao Paulo (afternoon): University Campus
• May 8th, from 4pm to 8pm: Social Network Summit, Hotel Sonesta Ibirapuera (Sao Paulo)

More information and registration is available on Mentez’s website.

To get an idea of the environment at previous OpenSocial Hackathons, you can check out this video done by Clive Boulton from Silicon Valley Web Builders.

Both Jason and David are up for local drinks ups, I mean meet ups, so if you are interested in hanging out with these fellas, please leave a comment here and they will be in touch with details.

Joyent Players' Club

Today at the Facebook Developer Garage in Austin, TX (one of the side events at the South by Southwest Interactive conference) we introduced Joyent’s Players’ Club.

Players’ Club allows developers on social networking platforms the ability to scale very large without having to spend any money with Joyent. Joyent’s Players’ Club is by invitation only. If you have an application running on a social networking site, please feel free to contact playersclub [at] joyent [dot] com to see if you qualify.

50 New Accelerators in One Go

I’m hanging out at the BuildingWebApps RailsQuickStart Seminar class in San Francisco.

Christopher Haupt just lead the class through the process of logging into their Joyent Accelerators for the first time.

This is the first time I have seen so many people log into new Accelerators simultaneously. Since we launched the Free Joyent Facebook Accelerators , there have been times when literally hundreds of new developers created new accounts in a day. But seeing it first hand is fun.

BTW, the next version of this class will be run on April 29-30. This class sold out, so make sure you register early for the next one.

JRuby Hack Day: August 8, 2007

Joyent and Sun are proud to present the first in a series of Hack Days, where you will get a chance to hear about the latest technologies and learn how to use them in an interactive unconference styled event.

The first Hack Day launches on August 8th at the Axis Cafe in San Francisco, CA where top technologists from Joyent and Sun will introduce you to the benefits of including Java in your next Ruby app.

We’ll discuss how deploying JRuby on a open source JVM can scale your application and utilize the good aspects of Java EE – management, clustering, failover and monitoring. Additionally, you’ll have the opportunity to code and deploy a JRuby on Rails application on Joyent’s Accelerators that harnesses the expansive collection of first-rate Java libraries.

There will even be a little Glassfish goodness in there just to keep things really exciting.

There is no fee to attend.

Dinner and an open bar will also be provided, so register now to ensure your seat is locked in. There are only 40 seats available, so if there is any doubt of you making it, please do not register as you might be taking a spot away from someone who can come.

For more information:

• Hack Day web page
• Agenda
• Registration

We are working to bring the Joyent/Sun Hack Days to a city near you, so stay tuned for future announcements!