Joyent Blog

At https://mnx.io we are using http://smartos.org from the great folks at http://Joyent.com You can look at https://project-fifo.net for managing smartos. I'd be happy to discuss in detail if it looks interesting!

Joyent Accelerators ( http://www.joyent.com ) are flexible, and they're the "official" Ruby on Rails host. They also happen to offer the best control panel (Virtualmin, of course). The only negative might be that Accelerators are Solaris systems--I don't have any complaints about that, but if you're accustomed to Linux, it might be a bit of a learning curve. Slicehost ( http://www.slicehost.com ) has a good reputation. Their Xen systems are not over-subscribed and they know their business. Media Temple (http://www.mediatemple.com ) had a good reputation until recently...but I'm sure it was a temporary setback. They're technically savvy. They're using a kind of quirky virtualization layer (Virtuozzo) which, when over-subscribed even a little bit (and sometimes even when not), exhibits serious memory issues. Gridzones ( http://www.gridzones.com ) is another Solaris zones based host, and they have some reasonable plans. It's a smaller shop, so probably gives more personal service. Tell Phil that Joe from Virtualmin sent you (I dunno if it'll get you a discount, but he'll be happy to hear from you). They start at $15, which is hard to beat (you probably want more space than that, though...). They're also Virtualmin friendly, when appropriate (i.e. when you have enough space/memory for full service hosting). If you're wanting to spend a little more, The Planet and Server Beach both offer dedicated boxes starting at around $69, I think. I've used both for years with…

The record size setting is the max, ZFS can use less in some cases. The best one depends on the data youre writing and the ashift of the pool, so testing is best. Large record sizes are helpful for large files (less overhead losses). Some good beginner info https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/zfs-versus-raid-eight-ironwolf… Some advanced info https://www.joyent.com/blog/bruning-questions-zfs-record-size

While it lacks some image-hosting specific features (like gallery or tagging, etc) I use Triton for Object Storage[1] (formerly Manta) for hosting a good number of images and some videos. It works great, it's really cheap[2] and the CLI tools are very easy to use `mput ~~/stor/public/img/ -f somepic.jpg` [1] https://www.joyent.com/triton/object-storage [2] https://www.joyent.com/pricing/cloud/storage

Which Linux distro do you recommend for running KVM? Additionally, SmartOS has good support for running KVM virtual machines [1]. It gives good solid stability and integration with ZFS, not sure of the performance though vs Linux. The main downside of SmartOS is somewhat sporadic hardware support (broadcom nic's out, intel nic's in). I prefer SmartOS now where I can, but knowing which Linux distro is useful especially for GPU support. 1: https://www.joyent.com/blog/why-smartos-kvm-dtrace-zones-and-more

Bryan Cantrill has a great post on unikernel models: https://www.joyent.com/blog/unikernels-are-unfit-for-production From my read, the benefits do not outweigh the costs. If you want light weight microservices, OS level virtualization is the way to go.

Would love to see Joyent included. Silly pricing, hopefully performance that justifies it. https://www.joyent.com/pricing/cloud/compute

One of the things that stands out to me personally is that Illumos/ Solaris values debugging (both in-situ and postmortem) far more than other platforms. Both ZFS and dtrace are brilliant examples of this as well as mdb but I'm much less well versed in the later. If you're interested I'd recommend browsing through posts of perhaps to two largest Illumos deployments. https://www.joyent.com/blog http://www.circonus.com/blog

As a note for people, if your constraints are a bit different then these are some services to check out: Joyent Manta: https://www.joyent.com/manta Hyper: http://hyper.sh Possibly Joyent Triton: https://www.joyent.com/triton I personally often want to run a bunch of things for ~1-15 minutes, and have too much data or setup to fit neatly in a lambda function. However, I don't need 1000 things running simultaneously, although manta would help still there. I'd love to see some more layers over the top of services like this, hopefully someday getting us back to picloud. I miss that service.

This seems to be the Manta [0] way. Letting you run your beloved Unix command pipeline on your Object Store files. [0] https://www.joyent.com/manta But the youtube videos with Bryan Cantrill are even better at explaining.

the guy says he's not an idiot then brags about spending $30 per month on a VPS (idiot), You can always go with cheap, fully virtualized GNU/Linux server, or you can go with a virtual, true UNIX server running at the speed of bare metal[1]. Your choice, but quality, correctness of operation, data integrity and performance still cost something. It you don't care about any of those things, fork out $5 for the alternative and call it a day. [1] http://www.joyent.com/

The talk on finding vulnerabilities in dtrace to escalate privileges seemed to be the most interesting/terrifying to the attendees. Definitely worth watching: https://www.joyent.com/about/events/2016/dtrace-conf/videos/dtrace-exp…

HashiCorp also has a pretty complete solution called Atlas : https://www.hashicorp.com/ ( different from the Netflix Atlas http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/12/introducing-atlas-netflixs-primary… ) Joyent's Triton looks cool: https://www.joyent.com/ as does CoreOS's Tectonic (built on top of k8s): https://tectonic.com/

I'm reminded of the classic video of a guy shouting at hard drives and causing their latencies to spike: https://www.joyent.com/blog/shouting-at-the-datacenter

+1 for another great bredangregg article. [2] https://www.joyent.com/blog/unikernels-are-unfit-for-product...

Many of the author's desires are handled in SmartOS (https://www.joyent.com/blog/triton-docker-and-the-best-of-all-worlds)

Yes Joyent's Triton may be the best way to run docker containers, not only for ZFS, but for Illumos Zones, network virtualization.. You may be interested by this article from Casey Bisson, about running Mesos on Triton: https://www.joyent.com/blog/mesos-by-the-pound

And you can run Docker containers on SmartOS, using "LX-branded zones", which do Linux syscall emulation: https://www.joyent.com/blog/triton-docker-and-the-best-of-all-worlds I'd be curious if the Joyent folks believe Triton to have the security properties that everyone seems to want out of Docker. It doesn't involve the standard Docker daemon, so it might.

Disclaimer: I'm the CTO at Joyent. For whatever it's worth, we completely agree with the sentiment (and I like your "blue collar apps" term) -- and we deliberately have designed Triton[1] for ease of use by virtualizing the notion of a Docker host. I think that the direction you are pointing to (namely, ease of management for very small deployments) is one that the industry needs to pay close attention to; the history of technology is littered with the corpses of overcomplicated systems that failed because they could not scale down to simpler use cases! [1] https://www.joyent.com/blog/triton-docker-and-the-best-of-all-worlds

That document has been around since March of last year; it's not a terribly recent thing. See also: https://www.joyent.com/blog/best-practices-for-error-handling-in-node-…

My initial thought was: wow, this looks like a great validation of the idea behind Joyent Manta[1] storage+process. I wonder if it would've been a good fit for 500px, and how it would compare in terms of price/performance? Granted, they now have a working system on s3, so maybe for the next up-and-comming competitor? ;-) Great write-up, btw. And thanks for the heads-up about vips/nip2 -- I wasn't aware of those. [1] https://www.joyent.com/object-storage

If anyone's still following this thread, the blog post is up: https://www.joyent.com/blog/debugging-enhancements-in-node-0-12

You mean Joyent?[1] Which has existed for quite a while. 1. https://www.joyent.com/

That was a great blog post, one that I don't remember having seen. That's exactly what I'd hope for. It kind of throws into contrast Joyent's. http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

Funnily, Bryan's the same person who also showed contempt in crucifying one node's largest OSS contributors in public is now seeking to attract more contributors to the same project? The 2 character pull-request that took down libuv's largest and one of node's largest ever contributors: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 Bryan's public Crucifixion of Ben: http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun Ben Noordhuis's Response: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 and HN Story of his Departure: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6845286 No thanks, I can't see myself ever touching or recommending Joyent's services as a result.

It seems to me that the workloads on Digital Ocean are not fully utilizing the block device. FIO shows about 50% util for DO, and 81% for Linode on the queue depth=1 test, and 70%/82%, respectively, on the queue depth=8 test. Which seems to indicate a bottle neck somewhere else (at least on DO), and that seems to align with OP's statement at the end, where it seems DO is being capped. Also as it was pointed out, the sizes of these VPS are not even mentioned, and most likely the working set size of 128MB, might be either too small or too big for any of these VPS, making even harder to see the value of these results. Brendan Gregg has excellent info on these topics, http://www.joyent.com/blog/benchmarking-the-cloud http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/05/11/file-system-latency-part-1/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2012/10/23/active-benchmarking/

I love the idea of fund-raising from customers. There are a few different angles on it, and one memorable one was the TextDrive thing[1][2]. That turned out a little bit controversial later[3], but it illustrates some nice, creative thinking. Is there a way you can get your customer to commit some money today, to an extent that they might not otherwise, based on future considerations? If you can do it without creating a scenario that bankrupts you in the future, it might be worth a shot. [1]: http://www.joyent.com/blog/celebrating-textdrives-three-years [2]: http://photodude.com/2004/06/01/textdrive-or-how-to-raise-40000-in-4-d… [3]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/16/cloud-computing-company-joyent-leaves…

> curl http://joyent.com/ curl: (7) couldn't connect to host Doesn't look like an SSL issue... Tracing the route to joyent.com (165.225.132.33) [...] 8 * * * 9 65.125.14.38 [AS 209] 312 msec 316 msec 308 msec 10 command timed-out

This is great in so many ways: - New logo! Much better "brand" than previous, and look good in small sizes, although I will miss the cute visual pun of GIT letters being refresh, addition and subtraction symbols. Although, both favicon and logo image would look better without half-transparent-pixels in vertical branch. - New font! Adelle from Typekit, not from Google Fonts. They took it seriously, and it's a fantastic choice. - The whole branding and theme and everything is way better than what was before, and arguably the best looking site for any DVCS. (maybe took some design inspiration from http://www.joyent.com/products/ ?) - Built on Rails, and open sourced: https://github.com/github/gitscm-next That's great, and hopefully will allow the community to contribute more to the site itself.

The only thing I can think of is http://joyent.com/ Initially they were a FreeBSD shop, I think Sun gave them heavy subsidies to switch to OpenSolaris on Sun hardware. I'm not sure how much the sweetheart deal was relaxed as Joyent grew.