When someone as important and as prominent as Jason Hoffman reads and follows your blog, you tend to stand up and take notice. I found out last week that Jason Hoffman, Founder and CTO of Joyent, was doing just that, I was deeply honoured and elated.
My Asian values started kicking in and I felt that I should reciprocate his gracious visits with a piece on Joyent. I have known about Joyent, thanks to Bryan Cantrill as the VP of Engineering because I am bloody impressed with his work with DTrace. And I have followed Joyent’s announcements every now and then, even recommending a job that was posted on Joyent’s website for a Service Delivery Manager in Asia Pacific for my buddy a couple of months ago. He’s one of the best Solaris engineers I have ever worked with but the problem with techies is, they tend to wait for everything to fall into place before they do the next thing. Too methodical!
I took some time over the weekend to understand a bit more about Joyent and their solution offerings. They are doing some mighty cool stuff and if you are Unix/Linux buff/bigot like me, you would be damn impressed. For those people who has experienced Unix and especially Solaris, there is an unexplained element that describes the fire and the passion of such a techie. I was feeling all the good vibes all over again.
Unfortunately, Joyent is not well known in this part of the world but I am well aware of their partnership with a local company called XyBase in an announcement in June last year. Xybase, through its vehicle called Anise Asia, entered into the partnership to resell Joyent’s SmartCenter solution. For those who has worked with XyBase in Malaysia, let’s not go there. 
Enough chitter-chatter! What’s Joyent about?
Well, for Malaysian IT followers, we are practically drowned in VMware. VMware does a seminar every 1.5 months or so, and they get invited to other vendors’ events ever so frequently as well. My buddy, Mr. Ong Kok Leong, who was an early employee in VMware Malaysia, has been elevated to superstardom, thanks to his presence in everything VMware. It’s a good thing and kudos to VMware to take advantage of their first-to-market, super gung-ho approach in the last 3 years or so. They have built a sizable lead in the local market and the competitors like Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V are being left in a dust. I believe only RedHat’s KVM is making a bit of a dent but they are primarily confined to their own RedHat space. Furthermore, most of VMware competitors do not have a strong portfolio and a complete software stack to challenge VMware and what they have been churning out.
Here’s my take … consider Joyent because I see Joyent having a very, very strong portfolio to give VMware a run for its money. Public listed VMware has deep pockets to continue their marketing blitz and because of where they are right now, they have gotten very pricey and complicated. And this blogger intends to level the playing field a bit by sharing more about Joyent and their solutions.
I see Joyent having 4 very strong technologies that differentiates them from others. These technologies (in no particular order) are:
- node.js
- ZFS
- DTrace
- KVM
These technologies have been proven in the field because Joyent has been deploying, stress testing them and improving on them in their own cloud offering called Joyent Cloud for the last few year. This is true “eating your own dogfood” and putting your money where your mouth is. This is a very important considering when building a Cloud Computing offering, especially in the public cloud space. You need something that is proven and Joyent Cloud is testimonial to Joyent’s technology.
So let’s start with a diagram of the Joyent Cloud Software Stack.
Key to the performance of Joyent Cloud is node.js.
node.js as quoted in its website is “Node.js is a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.” The key to this is being event-driven and asynchronous and cloud solutions developed using node.js are able to go faster, scale bigger and respond better. The event-based model follows a programming approach in which the flow of the program is determined by events that occurred.
A simple analogy is when you (in Malaysia) is at McDonald’s. In the past, the McDonald’s staff will service and fulfill your order before they service the next customer and so on. That was the flow of the past. Some time last year, McDonalds’ decide that their front staff would take your order, sends you to a queue and then took the order of the next customer. The back-end support staff would then fulfill your order putting that burger and drink on your tray. That is why they are able to serve (take your money) faster and get more things done. This is what I understand about event-driven, when it is applied in a programming content.
node.js has been touted as the new “Ruby-on-Rails” and it is all about low-latency, and concurrency in applications, especially cloud applications. Here’s a video introducing node.js, by Joyent’s very own Ryan Dahl, the creator of node.js.
Besides performance, you would also need a strong and robust file system to ensure security, data integrity and protection of data as it scales. ZFS is a 128-bit, enterprise file system that was developed in Sun more than 10 years ago, and I am a big admirer of the ZFS technology. I have written about ZFS in the past, comparing it with NetApp’s Data ONTAP and also written about ZFS self-healing properties in dealing with Silent Data Corruption. In fact, my buddy (him being the more technical one) and I have been developing storage solutions with ZFS.
Cloud Computing is complex and you have to know what’s happening in the Cloud. For the Cloud Service Provider, they must know the real-time behaviour of the cloud properties. It could be for performance, resource consumption and contention, bottlenecks, applications characteristics, and even for finding the problems as quickly as possible. For the customers, they must have the ability to monitor, understand and report what they are consuming and using in the Cloud.
The regular used buzzword is Analytics and DTrace is the framework developed for Cloud Analytics. When it comes to analytics, nothing comes close to what DTrace can do. Most vendors (including VMware) will provide APIs for 3rd party ISVs to develop cloud analytics but nothing beats having the creator of the cloud technology given you the tools that they use internally. That is what Joyent is giving to the customer, DTrace, a tool that they use themselves internally. Here’s a screenshot of DTrace in action for Joyent’s SmartDataCenter.
I have always said that you got to see it to know it. Cloud visibility is crucial for the optimal operational efficiency of the cloud.
Joyent already has Solaris Zones technology in its offering. But the missing piece was bare metal hypervisor and last year, Joyent added the final piece. KVM (Kernel-based Virtualization) was ported to Joyent, and KVM is more secure, and faster than the traditional approach of VMware, which relies on binary translation. KVM would mean that the virtualization kernel has direct interaction and communication with the native x86 virtualization on processors that supports hardware virtualization extension. There is a whole religious debate about native, paravirtualization and binary translation on the web. You can read one here, and as I said, KVM is native virtualization.
There are lots more to know about Joyent but you got to spend some time to learn about it. It is not well known (yet) in this part of the world, my intention in this blog entry is to disseminate information so that you readers don’t have to be droned into one thing only.
There are choices and in the virtualization space, it is just not always about VMware. VMware deserves to be where they are but when one comes into power (like VMware), he/she tends to become less friendly to work it. A customer should not be subjected to this new order of oppression because businesses are there when there are customers. And as customers, they are always choices and Joyent is one good choice.