Joyent Weblog
Touch a Joyeur: Upcoming Events
By Kristie Wells 7 January 08 Comment [1]
CES (Las Vegas, NV)
January 9, 2008
David Young is heading to Vegas and plans to keep his Wednesday night free for some Joyeur love. If you are interested in throwing back a Manhattan with him, leave a comment here and he will lock something in.
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App Camp 2008 (Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa)
January 15-17, 2008
Jason Hoffman will be in Johannesburg and Cape Town (South Africa) next week to speak at App Camp 2008.
App Camp is hosted by Mentez and our new pals Microsoft, to bring South African developers together to share experiences while learning about social networking applications. There will be topics on best practices in addition to the infrastructure and technology required to develop the best applications.
Spaces are limited, so please make sure you reserve yours now:
- Johannesburg [January 15th]
- Cape Town [January 17th]
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Geek Dinner (Cape Town, South Africa)
January 16, 2008
A big ‘thank you’ to Jacques Marneweck for putting together a geek dinner in Cape Town the night of January 16th.
If you plan on coming, please RSVP on the Facebook page so he can let the restaurant know how many to expect in advance.
Joyent Meetup (Miami)
By David Young 20 December 07 Comment [3]
Turns out, I’ll be in Miami night if anyone wants to get a drink. A mini-meetup. Door prizes. I’m thinking Coral Gables.
Update: this for 20 December.
Jason Interviewed by 89.3 KPCC: The End of Multitasking?
By Kristie Wells 14 December 07 Comment [4]
The folks over at 89.3 KPCC were kind enough to ask Jason to join them on their Monday afternoon show to discuss the pros and cons of multi-tasking.
Lead into the discussion:
The phone’s ringing. The emails are coming in. You’re ordering lunch…and driving a five-ton SUV. Busy Americans are famed for their ability to multi-task. But research shows that the constant barrage is taking a toll on productivity and health. The message: Americans need to turn off their electronic devices and focus on one task at a time. Silicon Valley firms are heeding the advice, cutting out instant messaging and swearing off multitasking – but can they still compete with their multitasking competitors? And are they really more efficient?
- Jason Hoffman: A founder of Joyent, which designs Web-based software for small businesses.
- Russell Poldrack, associate professor of psychology at UCLA
Click here to listen to the show. [Update: the link appears to be broken.]
This conversation stemmed from Jason being quoted in the New York Times on November 11th in an article discussing Tim Ferriss’ new book, The Four Hour Work Week.
The Crunchies: Nominate Joyent
By Kristie Wells 11 December 07 Comment
If there is a category that you feel suits us well, feel free to put our name there. We would surely appreciate it.
New Podcast: Quad Core (Episode 1)
By David Young 5 December 07 Comment [2]
Welcome to the new podcast from Joyent: Quad Core. Same basic format and topics as on PS Pipe Grep, but with one more core to process, Mr Rod Boothby.
This week we talk about Facebook (Beacon, Developers, Cookies); Googling one’s own name, Hemingway, Jason’s upcoming wedding, Social networking as a trend, native Windows apps on Leopard, and Ubuntu 7.10 among many side rides and tangents.
Podcast feed
iTunes link (thanks to J.D. Justice for providing this to us)
Here’s the link to the mp3 on my BingoDisk account
This week’s music provided by will.i.am
December Accelerator Sale
By David Young 4 December 07 Comment [6]
Joyent is holding its annual December sale.
This year we’re offering Accelerators for great prices. Pay for one year of an Accelerator, get two years. Pay for two years, get five.
Available for Small, Medium and Large Accelerators.
What can you do with free?
By David Young 4 December 07 Comment
The application, Perfect Match, got into the Facebook top 15 for applications on a free Joyent Facebook Accelerator. Here are the statistics. Look at the estimated valuation: US$1.8 million. On. a. free. Accelerator. Nice!
Fail Fast = Start-up Success
By Rod Boothby 1 December 07 Comment [3]
One of the things we are most proud of at Joyent is our history of helping fledging start-ups bootstrap themselves into a successful business.
A critical component of this is giving you the flexibility to “fail fast”. This means you can try a business plan, see if it catches on, adjust and react to market changes, and most importantly, gain traction and revenues before you ever need to seek funding. With a deal like the free Joyent Facebook Accelerators, we take care of the hosting infrastructure, Facebook provides you with a distribution channel and all you need to bring is the code.
Fred Wilson over at Union Square Ventures has an interesting post entitled Why Early Stage Venture Investments Fail which proves the value of this flexibility.
Fred puts it this way:
So it’s pretty clear to me that most venture backed investments don’t fail because the business plan was flawed. In my experience at least 2/3 of all business plans we back are flawed. Most venture backed investments fail because the venture capital is used to scale the business before the correct business plan is discovered. That scale/burn rate becomes the cancer that kills the business.
And to prove it, he gives some nice statistics on companies that he has funded. He compares the performance of companies that were nimble enough to transform their business (aka the ones that failed fast) with the businesses that stuck to one plan and did not or could not ever adjust.
The lessons for this are simple:
- Keep all your costs variable
- Get traction before raising capital.
Using cloud computing as part of your infrastructure is one way to accomplish both of these goals.
Apple TV: What it is
By David Young 28 November 07 Comment [3]
There has been quite a bit of rumbling about the Apple TV, lately. It’s supposed to be a laggard for Apple. Maybe so, but I’m crossing my fingers Apple doesn’t drop it as a product.
If Apple TV was positioned as a Tivo or digital video recorder (DVR) killer, that was a mistake. It never had the electronics capabilities to compete. What Apple TV is is a multimedia extension to the Macintosh for songs, videos, photos. Likewise, Airport Express can be thought of as an extension to iTunes for songs to my stereo. As an extension of my Macintosh for songs, videos, photos, I judge the Apple TV to be a big success. The price is right, it’s easy to use. It has very little to do with broadcast TV, as the “TV” moniker might imply. In fact, it only connects to high-end digital TVs for display purposes. But for displaying the songs, videos, and photos I have on my Macintosh, it works very well. I’m not aware of another product that works as seamlessly, short of connecting a Mac Mini to the TV.
Thanks Handbrake.
Cloud Computing Infrastructure for Facebook Developers on Dell Servers. What does it mean?
By David Young 22 November 07 Comment [15]
[Note: I’m going to be writing some longer posts about the needs of a cloud computer. This first post details the need for reliable supply. Please take this in the spirit it’s offered: a survey of one company and its experience in the market.]
I wrote recently that the operating system doesn’t matter anymore for developers of internet applications. Joyent’s announcement last week that we would be providing free cloud computing infrastructure to Facebook developers is further evidence that this is true. We spent a considerable amount of time optimizing Joyent Accelerators for Facebook, not for OpenSolaris (the OS we use). A Facebook developer can sign up for a free Joyent Accelerator here, get their application up and running within a few minutes, and be on their way. We did this a couple times with a couple customers last week at the Dallas Facebook Developer Garage. One of them had been kicked off their hosting provider because they were actually using some of the “free” bandwidth that over-selling hosting providers market. They were up and running on Joyent Accelerators within minutes of getting their log-in. The operating system didn’t matter in the process.
Joyent the Meta-manufacturing Company: We Need Stuff On-demand
If the operating system doesn’t matter to developers, the server under the operating system shouldn’t matter either. In fact, that is true to the extent that there are many makers of server hardware and they are mostly interchangeable. But in another way, the servers does matter to developers. Can the server hardware manufacturer your development stack runs on scale at the velocity of your application? While most Joyent customers don’t worry about whether we have enough power and cooling, they will need to worry, at a point, whether we have enough CPU, RAM, and storage. And, since Joyent doesn’t make any of those consumables, we have to turn to businesses that do. Joyent is, in this regard, a meta-manufacturing company. We manufacture a compute cloud upon which developers can run web applications and scale them. Our Facebook offering, and the scale issues that can face developers on Facebook, meant that we had to have parts suppliers for our cloud computer that could also scale.
A Brief Excursus: What Happened with Joyent and Sun?
When I got off the stage last week at the Dallas Facebook Developers Garage having made the announcement about Facebook and Joyent and Dell, one of the consistent questions was: “What happened to your relationship with Sun?” We continue to use Sun technology for critical parts of our infrastructure. The most obvious is our choice of Solaris Zones as virtualization building block of Joyent Accelerators. We continue to believe this is a better choice than embracing Xen (though others don’t always agree, ironically). This doesn’t mean we’ll never use Xen. We still don’t support .NET, a technology that is officially supported for Facebook developers. Xen would help with that. But so would VMWare.
One problem with Sun continues to be the sales model. In order to ensure dependable supply, we had to sign-up to buy large numbers of servers whether we actually used them or not. Sun put the risk onto the customer. We came to the conclusion that Joyent can’t buy from Sun if Joyent can’t buy direct from Sun. Faced with the tsunami that the Facebook opportunity represented, we couldn’t/didn’t know how big a pre-buy to make. It was too big a risk.
This on top of the fact that we wanted to buy the new Sunfire X4150 (dual socket, quad-core) but nobody in the channel (that hated word, “channel”) could tell us when we could get them. This for a model that had been announced weeks back. Why not just continue with the Sunfire X4100s we’ve been using. Well, for one, the X4150s allow us to cram tons of storage into the server, thus side-stepping many of the iSCSI issues (target) we have had with OpenSolaris. It’s one reason Joyent has been buying NetApps. And, again, the Facebook opportunity meant we would be building out significant infrastructure. To put it into the context of a systems manufacturer: our servers are Joyent’s CPU. We didn’t feel like installing the 586, when the 686 was freely available on the market.
Jonathan Schwartz has said these problems would be fixed, but they haven’t. And we don’t see anything to indicate that they will. We’ve talked with all sorts of Sun sales people. They put us into a special group for internet companies. We have made personal appeals to senior executives at Sun (that generally are answered…thanks for that). We’ve passed out bottles of 18-year old scotch. But the fact remains: every time Joyent engages Sun sales, they can’t really sell me something. The channel gets in the way. This is unfortunate, and ironic, for a company that did $1 billion in direct sales in a year (within three years of being founded).
So we called Dell
We had test systems FedEx’d to us and confirmation that Joyent would be able to run our stack on their stack within 36 hours. Once we had given the green light, the systems were in our data centers in two days. And OpenSolaris is supported on these systems according to a recent news item. We have a direct sales representative at Dell who is amazing. We don’t have to work the Dell organizational chart because our sales representative just gets things done. There’s not much to say about the Dell relationship because it is drama-free. Joyent’s relationship with Sun wasn’t. A cloud computing company needs reliable, drama-free supply. It’s that simple.
Update (Nov 24)
I got this interesting anecdote from a reader:
I found your recent acquisition of a large batch of PowerEdge 2950s to be quite interesting. We’re a smaller Dell customer, about 10 servers per month (SC1435 and 2970) and have made two attempts in the last 18 months to purchase (or at least get some pricing) on Sun servers. Both attempts including one about a week ago led to unanswered emails and the eventual passing us off to a VAR, which we specifically asked for direct sales when we spoke to a front level sales associated at sun.
Just trying to get a sales associate at sun to give us a similar system to our Web/Database builds was like pulling teeth, we were told to sign up for sun startup essentials before we could get into conversation. Three weeks later one of their VARs from Texas (we’re in Portland) was knocking on our virtual door.
My assumption was that our purchasing volume was just too low for the interest of direct sales from Sun, however, your comments on the Joyent/Sun situation seem to indicate it being more of a culture issue in the realm of Sun sales management.
Good luck with your new hardware and keep up the great work at Joyent.