Fifteen years ago, I initiated a time-honored tradition among my colleagues in kernel development at Sun: shortly after the first of every year, we would get together at our favorite local restaurant to form predictions for the coming year. We made one-year, three-year and six-year predictions for… [Read more...]

When looking back on 2014 from an infrastructure perspective, it's hard not to have one word on the lips: Docker. (Or, as we are wont to do in Silicon Valley when a technology is particularly hot, have the same word on the lips three times over à la Gabbo: "Docker, Docker, DOCKER!") ... [Read more...]

When I joined Joyent this past summer, two things were clear to me. First, that Docker had sparked a “container revolution” that would define the next era of cloud and infrastructure management. And, second, that the battle-tested, infrastructure container technology that underpins the Joyent Pub… [Read more...]

In a recent blog post, CoreOS essentially declared war on Docker with the announcement of Rocket, their own rival system. This seems to be the essence of the CoreOS criticism of Docker: Unfortunately, a simple re-usable component is not how things are playing out. Docker now is building tools for… [Read more...]

You may have seen that we recently open sourced SmartDataCenter and Manta. Because Joyent pioneered the use of infrastructure containers, you would be forgiven for asking the question: does this mean that SDC somehow competes with Docker? The answer is emphatically not — and in fact, to the c… [Read more...]

Today we are announcing that we are open sourcing the two systems at the heart of our business: SmartDataCenter and the Manta object storage platform. SmartDataCenter is the container-based orchestration software that runs the Joyent public cloud; we have used it for the better half of a decade to… [Read more...]

Several months ago, I was looking for a new opportunity, one that would be part of a fundamental shift in cloud technology. I could see that Docker had elevated containers from an operational detail to a hot new developer tool, but what did this mean for the future of infrastructure? ... [Read more...]

Today, Joyent and several members of the Node.js community announced a proposal for a Node.js Advisory Board as a next step towards a fully open governance model for the Node.js open source project. The Node.js Advisory Board will provide input to the Node.js project leadership ... [Read more...]

tl;dr We are able to build 14,000 packages across 6 zones in 4.5 hours At Joyent we have long had a focus on high performance, whether it's through innovations in SmartOS, carefully selecting our hardware, or providing customers with tools such as DTrace to identify bottlenecks in their application… [Read more...]

When working with Node streams, particularly object-mode streams, it's often helpful to be able to inspect a pipeline. The vstream module instruments objects to provide: For all objects: a name: used in debug output and especially useful for data pipelines custom counters: create your own counters… [Read more...]

Recently, Joyent published a series of benchmarks using YCSB (Yahoo Cloud Service Benchmark) comparing the performance of MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Elasticsearch between machines running in the Joyent Public Cloud and similarly configured machines running on Amazon Web Services. When I looked at the… [Read more...]

Machine-generated log data is a rich source of information that is used more and more frequently outside of the traditional scenarios of "developer debugging." Today, log data is used across the business for production monitoring, product usage tracking, application performance management, mobile… [Read more...]