I am delighted to announce that I have just joined Joyent, the Cloud Computing experts.

What is Joyent?

Joyent is a technology company. Joyent's Accelerator™ powered compute cloud provides a super scalable on-demand infrastructure for running web sites, including rich web applications written in Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Python.

Here's some fast facts on the company:

• Joyent has the largest OpenSolaris installation in the world.
• Joyent manages 252 TB of data.
• Joyent serves more than a half a billion Web page hits every month.
• Joyent delivers 10 million emails to their customers everyday.

Who are Joyent's Customers?

Joyent's customers are all looking for two things: speed and scale.

Joyent's customers range in size from solo start-ups to large companies. The common feature is a desire to quickly build and deploy a world class web application. Often, the desire for fast development times gets them thinking about Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is a perfect platform for building web based solutions very quickly.

Regardless of which web application framework they choose, the challenge of scaling to meet the demands of millions of users is daunting. Joyent's Accelerator's™ are designed to solve this problem.

Joyent's Accelerator™ customers fall into one of two groups

1. Internet start-ups that need scale without large capital expense: With Joyent, you don't need capital, you just need code. A great example of a company that fits into this mold is Twitter . Twitter has scaled to become a true Internet phenomenon. To tweet is now a verb, just like to google is a verb... at least it is as long as you don't work for them.
   
   Twitter's Jeremy LaTrasse described it this way: "Joyent Accelerators let us scale Twitter.com with the resources of a big company, while remaining agile like a startup.
2. Large companies that need quick time-to-market and scale without dedicating IT resources: Even if you have the capital to build out your own data center, it doesn't always make sense. You may want to focus your people on something else. You may only need the infrastructure for a short period of time such as for an interactive marketing effort. Kinzin's "Are you Normal" facebook application is a great example of this. Kinzin built the app to drive traffic towards their core product.

Why Joyent Has the Best Cloud

Obviously, a full answer to this question is highly technical. That said, here is a brief overview:

• Joyent has a long successful history of scaling Ruby on Rails web applications including their own Joyent Connector collaboration suite, Strongspace and Bingo Disk. They know how to scale Rails. If you build in Rails, Joyent's experience can prove invaluable. Beyond the Joyent Team, the Joyent Forums are simply an amazing resource.
• Joyent Accelerators run OpenSolaris . This sounds like a minor technical point to business types, but it actually has huge implications.
  
  Over time, I am going blog about many specific advantages here at on Joyeur. I want to cover two quickly now; DTrace and ZFS.
  
  Let's look at DTrace first. In one case, a Joyent customer leveraged DTrace to isolate a problem in their code, and thus reduce their CPU load by 35%, resulting in a 50% increase application speed. That is an amazing performance increase. You can't get DTrace on Linux. That means you can't get DTrace on EC2.
  
  Also missing on EC2 are the advantages brought to you by ZFS. ZFS is the OpenSolaris file system. Because of ZFS, each Accelerator instance is backed by a real section of a hard-drive (or a bunch of drives, depending on your need), and not some virtual instance that will disappear 0.1% of the time.
  
  Joel Reymont of Wager Labs put it this way: "The lack of a database within the Amazon Elastic Computing cloud is a killer for me. I'd rather pay more for a Joyent Accelerator and have a disk that doesn't go away when the machine reboots or crashes."
• Joyent uses hardware to help you scale. Joyent uses the best available routing and switching hardware (Force 10) and the best hardware load-balancers (F5 Networks).

What's My Role

Formally, my title is VP Platform Evangelism.

Informally, I am also going to act as a general customer advocate. Joyent does a lot of things very well, but like every company, it has areas it can improve. Customer service response time is one of them. Although I should let you know that a new service and support system is being put in place. This should make for many happy Joyent customers.

What's Coming Down the Pipe?

There are a couple of things that Joyent will be announcing in the near future that are truly cool. And some of the things Joyent is working on within the Joyent labs are going to game changing.