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Comment by wisty | Hacker News Reader

With a one-line pitch like "HIGH-PERFORMANCE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR REAL-TIME WEB AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS", what could possibly go wrong?

No, I don't hate Joyent. I can't even figure out what they offer. And I don't see "Python" or "Postgres" or "Redis" in their tech stack page, so what would reddit (a Python / Postres / Redis site) want with them? They seem to be mostly node.js / Mongo, which is a nice tech stack but isn't the one reddit is built on.

Clicking around their dev docs seems to suggest you can install your own stuff on their "SmartMachines" (are those Linux VMs?), but there's a heavy node.js bias to the docs.

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Joyent is some former Sun guys who are still committed to "the OS is a differentiator". They use Illumos, their fork of OpenSolaris...

I'm pretty sure python, postgres, and redis all run on Solaris, but Joyent's value add is NOT at the application layer, but in OS features that facilitate application workloads better. Their SmartMachines (or zones), ZFS, dtrace.. Solaris is an epic environment to develop in.

I probably only know of a few other OS's that are as powerful (IOS XR, OnTap, Linux..), and only corner cases are more enjoyable to work with (BeOS, plan9, lispmachine).

Their difficulty in messaging is probably around not wanting to be labelled "post-Sun", but cloud! internet! not oracle! You should think of them as providing an OS as a service.

OK, so they use "zones" (beefed up multi-user, which should have less overhead than virtualization) and a fork of OpenSolaris (interesting features, reputed to be very stable).

I wish they'd just say that, as it makes their "Faster than VM" claim seem a lot less wild.

Shared hosting is actually more efficient than VMs, but it got a bad rap due to massively oversold hosts.

Sun engineered some amazing stuff but eventually got bought out by a company with weaker engineers but much, much stronger sales team. After being burned in this way I could see how a bunch of former Sun staffers might use their former technology but call someone else in and say 'look, we can't market for shit - you have a go'.

And that's my guess on why their marketing spiel might seem a little vague to a tech person.

Personally I like Joyent - they've been very helpful to me, they support the community, they're a pretty cool company if I may say so.

And I don't see anything wrong with what Joyent did regarding their Reddit-commentary. It just shows that they are playful engineers with a sense of humor, that's all.

PS I think SmartOS is great.

I thought they would be a replacement for EC2, and not a Heruko-competitor. They provide virtual servers, and not application stacks.

I test drove them with regards to Picc.it, during the beginning of the year and they have a solid stack and great support. They are a little pricey though, so I decided to go with bare metal instead.

Solaris not Linux.

Minor nitpick but: s/Redis/Cassandra/

Yeah their Datasheet says it supports Python.

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