Can anyone explain Joyent to me? My understanding always was that they're some special kind of hosting provider. But I never really got it. They sponsor Node.js, they sponsor all kinds of ex-Sun Solaris-related stuff, employing high profile people from both communities. What does supporting (and, at a time in the past, basically running) Node.js get a hosting provider? What about Joyent's products is related to Node at all?<p>But oh, they're cancelling the public cloud, which I assume was the hosting service? Then what are they now? I went to their site but I totally didn't get it, I'm obviously not the target audience.<p>So, what does Joyent really do, how to they make money, and how does it make business sense for them to do all that illumos/zfs/node etc etc stuff? Are they an AWS competitor? A Heroku competitor? An Oracle/ex-Sun competitor? I really can't place them.
I can say without a doubt, if it weren’t for Joyent, my fantastic coworkers, and the experience and opportunity they granted me I wouldn’t be where I am today. I fondly remember debugging issues and learning so much with my talented coworkers. Congratulations Joyeurs on everything you’ve done to forward the Public Cloud and Systems Engineering.
TextDrive (bought by Joyent) was one of the first hosting services to support Ruby On Rails as a first-class service -- in the days when static hosting, PHP, Perl, and Java/Tomcat were the only options on Linux infrastructure. They were well-noted for their "lifetime hosting" membership deal, which was incredibly exciting at the time (this was in a day where flat-fee and free hosting outside the likes of MySpace and Geocities was unheard-of). TextDrive was where all the cool kids hosted their projects.<p>RIP Joyent public cloud (and the last remnant of TextDrive's legacy).
Sad to hear. I selfishly hope the company does well for the sole purpose of keeping Bryan Cantrill employed so he can continue to give fantastic talks that I watch on YouTube.
Wow, 5 months is an insanely short timetable to ask people to migrate entire systems to another vendor. I’m surprised their contracts don’t have better terms.
Here's a blog explaining the decision : <a href="https://www.joyent.com/blog/joyent-announces-strategic-change-to-their-public-cloud-business" rel="nofollow">https://www.joyent.com/blog/joyent-announces-strategic-chang...</a>
End of an era. Lots of good stuff to come out of Joyent and I hope we don't see the end of their OSS contributions.
Manatee (the state machine behind Manta PostgreSQL HA), the SmartOS KVM port, Triton itself - huge body of great stuff in addition to Illumos contributions that they are perhaps better known for.
> For our existing public cloud and private data center customers, adding scale, financial muscle, and Samsung as both a partner for innovation and as a large anchor tenant customer for Triton and Manta, will pay big dividends.<p>The tenant is now too large, please move out.
Oh no! I was just researching them and about to buy services! I suppose that's the problem. Too many "about to buy" and not enough actual buying.<p>But I mean, in honesty it's long overdue. Technical superiority loses out again.
One nice thing about having more cloud providers is having more options for where your computation was housed. I have had a machine at Joyent for a long time now (with the goal of building a service that I never got around to, so sadly for them only ever the one computer) because their US South West datacenter is located not just "in Vegas" but specifically at the SwitchNAP SuperNAP site, which co-located me with other resources I was using: I had a <1ms ping to my upstream telecom provider, and thereby could sit inside of real-time audio without adding noticeable latency (as well as have the option of getting extra-cheap bandwidth: I wasn't going to be costing Joyent anything for bandwidth but was still intending to use lots of CPU, so they had indicated a willingness to let me one-off this billing if I ever actually scaled up, though I was still quite happy to pay the full price for the epic latency). AWS is great (and I honestly used them for most of my less latency sensitive projects... hence the problem for Joyent, I appreciate), but their lack of a South West location means that the lowest ping I can get from them for this purpose is almost 20ms :(.
Sad day. I never used them but I always enjoyed Bryan Cantrill's postmortems and deep dives on Joyent all over the internet. Would love to see his take on this EOL announcement.<p>Bryan, are you around?
I fondly remember Joyent as one of the first companies to do Ruby on Rails hosting right. They were using a combo of FreeBSD, Virtualmin, Apache (proxying to mongrel etc).<p>Fun times!