Joyent: Newsletters

Joyeur Bytes - March 2008

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:49:34 GMT

Google and Hi5 tap Joyent for Open Social developer infrastructure

Joyent has teamed up the fine folks over at Hi5 and Google to bring our on-demand infrastructure to OpenSocial developers, much as we did recently with the Facebook partnership.

We look forward to working with both companies as we expand the OpenSocial community and empower developers to launch applications, without the worry of whether or not they will scale.

Introducing: The Players’ Club

Joyent is always looking for ways to help developers grow while keeping their infrastructure costs at a minimum. With this philosophy in mind, we launched the Players’ Club, which allows developers on social networking platforms the ability to scale very large without having to spend any money with us. Crazy, right?

Joyent’s Players’ Club is by invitation only. If you have an application running on a social networking site, please feel free to contact playersclub [at] joyent [dot] com to see if you qualify.

Joyent Becomes a Corporate Patron of the Free Software Foundation

We have long admired the efforts of the Free Software Foundation in the development community, and are pleased to add our official support for the organization. For more information on our commitment to Free Software and Open Source, please read David’s post here.

Believe in what they do? Give them a little love too by volunteering or sending in a donation. Every little bit helps.

New Partner Program Rolls Out The Door

We have created a formal Joyent Partner Program for companies that provide value-added services such as application development, consulting, marketing or advertising. The program includes opportunities to earn substantial referral fees, while providing your clients with Joyent's highly scalable infrastructure.

Interested? Get in touch via email: blake [at] joyent [dot] com or +1.415.874.5504.

Welcome Jacques Marneweck, Andrew Rodriguez and Luis Campuzano

Jacques Marneweck

Jacques is a top notch Web developer with a background in administering and developing on the FreeBSD and OpenSolaris platforms using PHP, Perl, MySQL and Apache. A Joyent (formerly TextDrive) customer since 2005, Jacques has been an active participant in the forums and been one of our most vocal advocates. We are (and he is) very happy to have him as part of our Customer Support team.

Andres Rodriguez

Andres lives by a simple motto: “to make what you really like, and create more efficient ways for people to do things.” An electronic engineering graduate from Bogotá, Colombia, Andres likes to balance his love of technology with creating fabulous dishes in the kitchen (he would like to be the head chef at his own restaurant someday) and honing his skills as a photographer. He also wishes to drink beers from 100 different countries, so we are thinking he will fit into our development team quite nicely.

Luis Campuzano

Luis hails from Manizales, a small town in Colombia where he says the air is clean and everyone there is happy. When he is not chained to his desk writing the next big Facebook application, Luis likes to pull back on a beer or two and hanging out with friends and family. He is very excited to be part of the development team, and we are super happy to have him on board as well.

Customer Highlight

Strawpoll

Rob Goodlatte and Dan Romero recently launched a polling service integrated with Twitter to collect daily surveys in a very simple manner. To play along you need to follow strawpoll on Twitter, then everyday strawpoll will ask a simple question and you can respond in the following way:

Question: Better superpower: flight (1) or invisibility (2)?

@strawpoll flight Because I am a bird. ---- or ---- @strawpoll 1 Because I am a bird. (Format is @strawpoll )

To see all the results from the poll, visit them online. Good stuff fellas.

Movable Love

Hey Moveable Type lovers, Aaron Bailey has built a showcase of beautiful and interesting sites powered by Movable Type. The site will soon be implemented in Movable Type Community Solution, which will allow readers to submit their own sites and rate others.

Last Exit To Nowhere

Arthur Case helped to launch a collection of unique shirt designs that are inspired and pay homage to some of the most memorable places, corporations and companies in 20th century fiction – from the sunny shores of Amity Island (Jaws) to the frozen climes of Outpost #31 (The Thing). Place your order now.

NOTE: If you would like Joyent to highlight your project in Joyeur Bytes or on our website, please provide a little background on your application by sending an email to kristie [at] joyent [dot] com.

Tips and Tricks: Useful Shell Commands

Ever wondered how to check how much memory you were using on your Accelerator? What about how many processes are currently running?

Well look no further than the Joyent wiki where we have these and several other useful commands listed to help you manage your resources and ensure your application keeps humming along smoothly.

Bites – not Bytes

You don’t get the rocking bodies we have by shying away from a good plate of food. And while we tend to eat out quite a bit, some of us happen to be pretty good cooks, so we thought we would start collecting favorite recipes from our fellow Joyeurs to share with one another to ensure our BMIs continue to hover around the 29 mark.

Dessert Quesadilla: from Will Styler

Tortillas
Marshmallow fluff
Shredded coconut
Chocolate chips
Cinnamon and sugar to taste

Directions

Take a tortilla, coat one side with marshmallow fluff. Then, apply a thin layer of sweetened shredded coconut, then an equal amount of milk and semi-sweet chocolate chips. Top it off with some cinnamon and sugar to taste.

Then, place said tortilla, fluff-side-up, on a medium/low heat skillet/pan/hibachi, and cover with a second tortilla. Heat until the top tortilla is stuck to the bottom one, pressing down occasionally to encourage chip-melting, and then flip. Just make sure not to burn the tortilla.

One full sized tortilla serves 3-4. They're best eaten about 10 minutes after preparation, and make sure to keep them tightly covered, to prevent tortilla drying.

Muffuletta: by Chris Heuer

4 Kaiser or other round, seeded rolls, each 4 inches in diameter, split
1 cup olive salad (can buy in most grovery stores in the condiment aisle)
3 oz. thinly sliced cooked ham
3 oz. thinly sliced Genoa salami
4 oz. thinly sliced mortadella
4 slices provolone cheese

Directions:

Lay the roll halves, cut sides up, on a work surface. Brush the cut sides with oil from the olive salad. On the bottom half of each roll, spread 2 Tbs. to 1/4 cup olive salad. Place the ham, salami, mortadella and cheese on top, dividing evenly. Cover each sandwich with the top half of a roll. Cook the sandwiches immediately, or cover and refrigerate overnight to allow the flavors to develop.

Preheat an electric panini press on medium-low according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Place the sandwiches, one at a time, on the preheated panini press. Cook according to the manufacturer's instructions until the sandwich is warmed through and the cheese is melted, 6 to 8 minutes. Transfer the sandwiches to a cutting board and cut each into quarters. Serve warm. Serves 6 to 8.

Got a favorite recipe or wish to suggest topics for the next newsletter? Please add them to this post and we will do our best to work it in.

We hope you will find this newsletter interesting and will keep on reading. We plan on sending these little nuggets out about six times a year, and appreciate your feedback to ensure it continues to provide information important to you. Please send your comments to kristie [at] joyent [dot] com.

Joyeur Bytes - Jan 2008

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:09:20 GMT

Joyent Delivers Scale

Did you know the largest application running on Joyent’s infrastructure is a Facebook application that serves up over 700 million pages a month and was built using Ruby on Rails? That’s right folks - Ruby on Rails DOES scale.

We are proud to have helped this amazing client quickly scale to meet that kind of traffic and will be working on posting more about their story shortly.

We are introducing a new pricing system aimed to help our clients plan for this kind of growth (think optimistically!). We now have much larger versions available, including Accelerators that come with 8GB, 16GB and 32GB of RAM that are ideal for large databases and, of course, can be grouped into clusters that include 100s of GBs of RAM.

We also changed the names as it seemed silly to have machines called 3XL, 4XL and 5XL. We simplified the naming convention to just state the amount of RAM that comes with your Accelerator.

Accelerator Name	Dedicated CPU Resources	Included Monthly Bandwidth*	RAM	Storage	Monthly Fee	Yearly Fee
1/4 GB	1/16	10 TB	256 MB	5 GB	$45	$450
1/2 GB	1/8	10 TB	512 MB	10 GB	$75	$750
1 GB	1/4	10 TB	1 GB	15 GB	$125	$1,250
2 GB	1/2	10 TB	2 GB	25 GB	$250	$2,500
4 GB	1	10 TB	4 GB	50 GB	$500	$5,000
8 GB	2	10 TB	8 GB	100 GB	$1,000	$10,000
16 GB	4	10 TB	16 GB	100 GB	$2,000	$20,000
32 GB	8	10 TB	32 GB	100 GB	$4,000	$40,000

As always, our Accelerators are built on OpenSolaris, multi-core (8+), RAM-rich servers (32GB+ each) with vast amounts of storage. Accelerators are deployed in the best routing and switching fabric (Force 10) and the best load-balancers (F5 Networks) available.

*We have also increased your bandwidth. Now, each customer can move up to 10TB per month, for FREE. If the average song on iTunes is 4.1MB, then 10 TB would be the equivalent to 2,557,502 songs. Amazon’s EC2 would charge you $1,800.00 a month for that kind of traffic. With Joyent, it is FREE.

If your site takes off and moves more than 10 TB cap, bandwidth costs $0.15 per GB.

Powering Over 11% of Daily Active Users on Facebook

In November of last year, we announced that Joyent was teaming with Dell to give away $3.2 Million in Joyent Accelerators to Facebook Developers. Our goal was to give developers the power to quickly create and deploy Facebook applications capable of scaling to millions of users.

So far, the program has succeeded tremendously.

Of the current total 14,939 apps on Facebook, 6% run on Joyent. But, the big deal comes here - according to Adonomics, on January 23rd there were 34,175,797 daily active users and of that number - 3,713,675 users came from applications that currently run on Joyent.

Joyent powers applications that reach 11% of the daily active application users on Facebook - and we are really proud of the reception we have received from the Facebook developer community.

Visit us on the Web for more information on the program, and to apply for your free account.

(Textdrive) BSD Server Migration to (Joyent) OpenSolaris Servers: Get Your Golden Ticket Now

We have been touting the new server environment we launched on OpenSolaris for a couple of months now, and thought we would give you a few more reasons why you should be asking for your ‘golden ticket’.
Read More

Welcome Linda Derezinski, Rod Boothby and Blake Burris

We are happy to announce the addition of Linda, Rod and Blake to the ever growing Joyent team.
Read More

Step One: Consolidate Forums

One of our goals for 2008 is to bring all the Joyent properties (Joyent, TextDrive, Strongspace and BingoDisk) under one roof to make it easier for you to find information when you need it, fast. We took the first big step recently and merged forum.joyent, forum.textdrive and forum.strongspace into one master forum at discuss.joyent.com.
Read More

Strongspace and BingoDisk: Outages and Updates

As many of you already know, BingoDisk and Strongspace suffered a major outage several weeks ago. Our CEO posted a statement on our blog reporting on what happened, how Joyent plans to compensate our customers, and what we plan to do in the future with Strongspace and BingoDisk.
Read More

Customer Spotlight

Stafftool

Toby Sterrett just launched Stafftool, the easiest way to manage their people, events, and communications. They are currently focused on churches and non-profits, but anyone needing a powerful communication tool can use it. And a special note - they are currently offering 200 lifetime ‘M’ accounts, so if this peeks your interest, buy it now. Deals like this are hard to come by.

J.D. Justice

We love that our community is full of developers, SysAdmins, designers, gamers, painters, photographers, and musicians. J.D. is of the latter genre and is quite a creative fella, writing his own music and producing videos to boot. Check out his music as we are sure you will quickly see why we have grown quite fond of him.

LOLCode

What can we say that has not already been said about LOLCode? Adam Lindsay wrote a programming language based off of Lolcats/Cat Macros and to say it spread like gangbusters through the geek community would not do it justice. He got Dugg, Slashdotted and so many pats on the back, we think he was bruised for a week. Congrats to Adam on his success and we can’t wait to see what comes next.

If you would like Joyent to highlight your project in Joyeur Bytes or on our website, please send a little information on your application to kristie [at] joyent [dot] com.

Tips and Tricks - Connector Workspace, from Josh Roebuck

The Workspace is a place where you can view selected groups (list view) from any application
Read More

Bites – not Bytes

Got a favorite recipe or wish to suggest topics for the next newsletter? Please add them to this post and we will do our best to work it in.

Joyeur Bytes - October 2007

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 09:09:30 GMT

Shared Accelerators – Formulate Plan. Launch Plan. Review Plan. Tweak Plan.

When we first offered up the golden tickets for the shared accounts on Solaris, we thought going by a combination of plan type and alphabet was a fair and organized way of pushing through the migration.

Based on the initial response, it was clear some customers would act faster than others (due to work commitments, family life, vacations, etc.), so a tweak in our original plan was needed. Enter: the ‘special request’.

There is no question this has definitely sped up the migration. In fact, there are so many special requests, that we have put the migration by alphabetical/plan type on hold [for now at least – we will start this back up once we work through the special request queue].

If you are interested in getting in early on the Solaris Shared Accelerators, please send the following info via email to kristie@joyent.com:

Subject line: migration request [insert type of plan - Premier, Plus or Startup]
Full Name
User Name(s)
Primary Domain Name
Current Server(s)

Also, several folks have asked us to change their username/domain name during the migration and we are happy to do so. If we haven't sent you a golden ticket yet and you want to change your username/primary domain, make sure to include this information in your special request email. Doing so after your account is set up will cause you to incur a $50 charge – so speak up now, or open up your wallet later. :)

And last item on the migration for now - we are going to forego sending a 'thank you for your request, we are processing your account' email back to everyone right now, and instead, just send you a response when your account is actually being set up. So don't fret you aren't hearing back from us immediately. Your emails are getting through, we swear. Just know going in the Premier accounts are taking a little longer as we are only putting 15 customers per box. Startup accounts go faster as we can put up to 100 per box. Also, please do not send follow up requests as it only slows the process down. If you asked questions when you sent in your migration request, we will answer those when your golden ticket is sent out. We hope you understand. Another option is to watch the Announcements section in the forums as we post there regularly.

The Joyent wiki is your friend. Your very knowledgeable friend.

Want to know what you should do to prepare for the shared migration? Need assistance in setting up Wordpress? Looking to install Django on your Accelerator?

Well then, check out the new and improved Knowledgebase on the Joyent wiki for these, and other goodies, sure to help you along your way. Something missing that should be there? Add it! That is the beauty of the wiki. Simply register on the site and start typing away. Your fellow Joyeurs will love you for it.

Pick Good Passwords, Please.

A weak password may give a hacker access not only to your computer, but to the entire network to which your computer is connected. That means not only your account can be compromised, but your server mates as well. Hackers can gain access to your computer for vandalism, credit card fraud, identity theft, intellectual property theft, or many other types of crime. It goes without saying - this is bad. Really bad.

We do everything we possibly can here at Joyent to prevent this from ever happening, and ask that you assist us in this process by using reasonable care to protect your account to avoid a security compromise by outside sources.

A big piece of this is using strong passwords.

I know it's tempting to pick something easy to remember, like spelling your user name backwards, or child's name, or a word from the dictionary. The problem is, the easier it is to remember, the easier it is for an intruder to steal. You also want to avoid using “jason/jason” or “admin/admin” as your login/password combination. This is a practice that will definitely get your hand slapped here, and could earn you an invoice from us [see the Acceptable Use policy] so why don’t you take a moment and check those passwords now. It could be the difference between a head full of luscious locks and a few gray hairs for you, and our Systems team.

Tips and Tricks

Linda Derezinski shares how to run a rake task from cron on your dedicated Accelerator.

On your mark. Get set. Go.

Bites – not Bytes

You don’t get the rocking bodies we have by shying away from a good plate of food. And while we tend to eat out quite a bit, some of us happen to be pretty good in the kitchen so we thought we would start collecting favorite recipes from our fellow Joyeurs to share with one another to ensure our BMIs continue to hover around the 29 mark.

Reboot soup (Belgian Onion Soup): from Mickael Therer

2-3 big onions
1 tablespoon of butter
1 tablespoon of flour
1-1.5 liter veal or beef bouillon (cubed broth will do)
1-2 tablespoons of Madeira red wine (a fine red Port if you haven’t sucked it all down already)
[Optional] 1 leaf of laurel, salt and pepper

For serving:

1 slice of German wheat white bread per serving
Grated Gruyère or Emmenthal cheese
Parsley

Cut the onions in large rings. Sauté the onions with the butter at med-hi heat until the rings separate and are turning transparent (don't let the butter or the onions brown). Turn the heat down and add the flour. Stir together less than a minute then cover with the warm broth. Add the laurel, salt and pepper if you wish (a good broth/stock won't need much additional seasoning). Add 1-2 tablespoons of Madeira wine. Cover and let simmer for max 10 minutes or until the onions are tender.

Warm the serving plates if you can. Toast the bread, and cover the bottom of the serving plates each with one slice of toasted bread. Pour the soup and top it with grated cheese, sprinkle with parsley and serve.

A serving variation is to put the soup first, then the bread and cheese on top and bake it "au gratin" a couple more minutes, this will make a cheese and bread crust on top of the soup.

This soup can be snacked on around the clock but is best served either when you've been drinking or working too much, possibly both, usually between 12 and 6 am.

Rhubarb Conserve from Larry Piper’s mother-in-law, Marilyn Livingston:

5lbs rhubarb, cut in ½ inch pieces
2 cans crushed pineapple
7 cups white sugar.
Small oranges unpeeled
½ cup broken walnuts

Drain pineapple and reserve fruit. Put juice in a sturdy large pot, add sugar-melting it cup by cup in 1 cup water. Add precut rhubarb. Cover pan and cook on low to allow time for rhubarb to soften and form juice.

Dice the oranges and add to mixture. Add the broken nutmeats. Add the pineapple pieces last. Cook until thickened, uncovered to allow juice to cook down, over low heat. Watch out that it does not burn. Put in jars and seal. Makes 6 to 7 pints.

Word on the street is this is truly stellar with peanut butter.

Got a favorite recipe or wish to suggest topics for the next newsletter? Please add them to this post and we will do our best to work it in. A request was made for an Employee Spotlight section so look for that in the next issue. We are sure that will thrill you all. Or not.

Edit: Added photo link to Reboot Soup

Joyeur Bytes - August 2007

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:00:01 GMT

Connector and Slingshot Are Now Open (Source) and Free

Joyent has open-sourced Connectorand Slingshot under the GPLv2.

What does this mean for you? Well, the products you have come to know and love will continue to get better as developers from around the world work with Joyent to improve on existing functionality and contribute new applications to the Connector and Slingshot product lines. A couple of folks have already started digging in, and we are hoping to have some cool announcements and applications to share with you in the very near future.

To expedite development of complimentary applications, we have also released a FREE 2 User / 2GB Connector account with all our applications: Email, Calendar, Bookmarks, Files, and Lists. Strongspace and Web Hosting are available by upgrading to the Startup, Plus, or Premier plans.

Want to learn more?

Read the official announcement – Joyeur blog post and the press release
Development wiki – Connector and Slingshot
Obtain your FREE Connector account – SignUp

Shared Accelerators – OpenSolaris Here We Come!

The knot of vipers has been untangled, and the first round of invitations have been distributed for the shared hosting accounts on the OpenSolaris platform.

We are starting the initial roll out slowly, to make sure the migrations go as easy as we think they will, so we ask for a wee bit of patience as the first group takes the plunge. There is a new Knowledgebase and we set up a Shared Accelerators forum to ensure you have the information you need – when you need to it help you along the way.

We are starting with the Premier customers, then rolling to Plus and then StartUp accounts, and all levels will be done alphabetically to keep it as fair as possible.

Not exactly sure what level your plan translates into?

All VC plans are 'Plus' (for hosting portion only)
Mixed Grill - 'Plus' (unless you were a VC who purchased before 12/9/06 or you purchased MG outright and then purchased an upgrade before 1/22/07, in which case you are Premier)
Three Martini Lunch - 'Premier' (unless you purchased before 12/9/06 in which case you are Empire = Premier limits x2)

The quotas on each plan can be found on the Connector pricing page.

We will be providing more updates shortly in the Shared Accelerators Forum, so stay tuned…

New Services: Accelerators Systems Support, Audit and Scale Services

We launched several new services where you can leverage Joyent’s expertise in application design, development and systems architecture to help you avoid some common early mistakes, and ensure that your end-users always have a great experience.

More information is available online in the Systems Support and Audit and Scale sections of the Joyent website.

Support. Help us, help you.

No one really enjoys contacting the Support Department as it means something is not as you expect it, and you’re unable to fix it yourself. When that happens, it is our goal to provide you efficient, effective, and reliable technical support.

To help us respond more quickly and more accurately to your inquiry, please do us a favor and first check to make sure what you are experiencing is a covered support item. If it is, then head to the Help Desk and give us as much detail as possible (too much is never enough) so we can solve your problems as quickly as possible.

If what you are experiencing happens to fall outside of our free technical support categories, we encourage you to search the Joyent Knowledge-base for a solution. Another option is to ask other Joyeurs on our support forums (see below). We recommend you check there to see if your question has been answered yet and if it hasn’t, put it out there for the community to respond to.

And do you know about the bat phone? All Joyent Accelerator hosting customers with a ‘L’ or above sized account have access to a dedicated emergency support phone line. This emergency support line is only for connectivity and hardware related issues such as: you cannot SSH into your container; you cannot access your NAS disk attached to your container; your system is not responding at all, etc. Please do not use the emergency support line for system configuration support.

The number was included in your welcome email, but if you cannot seem to put your fingers on it, please send an email to support [at] joyent [dot] com and we will send it your way.

Bytes Issue 1: Survey Results

We wish to extend a huge ‘thank you’ to everyone who took the time to complete the survey from the June issue of Bytes. It was overwhelmingly positive and reaffirmed some of the things we are doing here are right on track which was nice to see.

I guess this ‘communications’ thing actually works.

The majority of the requests came in for White Papers, Meetups, Tips and Tricks, and a little deeper discussion on the product roadmaps. Ok. Done. It might pain our Marketing team to do so, but we will minimize the ‘fluff’ factor and will beef things up technically in the newsletter (starting in the next issue). And who knows, we might even honor the request for a ‘Dave Joke of The Month’ section, but we make no promises here. Getting him to be funny on a regular basis could be a bigger project than we can take on right now…

So that is it for Issue #2. Our plan is to send these little nuggets out about six times a year, so we hope you find this newsletter interesting and will keep on reading future issues of Joyeur Bytes.

We also welcome your recommendations on subject matter and have set up a forum for you to share your feedback as well as some of your own tips, tricks and success stories. Now is the time to share people!

Be Joyent

Joyeur Bytes - June 2007

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:12:47 GMT

Welcome to the first issue of the Joyent newsletter

One of the biggest challenges we have faced in growing the company has been managing communications with you, our customers, not only in regards to regular product updates, but also with customer support tickets and new customer outreach.

We are working to remedy this and while we believe we are doing a better job in all areas – it still isn’t good enough. So enter Joyeur Bytes. This monthly newsletter will provide information on product releases, event announcements, tips and tricks, and other little what-nots.

We hope you will find some of it interesting and will keep on reading, but in case you don’t, just scroll all the way to the bottom and hit that “unsubscribe” link. We won’t hold that against you.

We are also really interested in hearing what you are thinking about, and want to know what we can do to better inform, educate and sometimes entertain you. So if you can find a spare minute or two, please take our little survey at the end and give us a little glimpse into your world.

So are you ready? Here we go…

Connector: Not Just An Email Client

Email. Calendar. Bookmarks. Contacts. Files. And now Lists, the latest addition to the Connector collaboration suite. Use Lists to organize your thoughts, your TO DOs, a big project, whatever you want.

We also recently announced intentions to open-source parts of the Connector team collaboration suite under the GPL v2. Joyent will continue to invest heavily into Connector while encouraging the Rails community to build new applications around the suite. New functionality and infrastructure will improve the experience for our existing and new customers alike. Connector is here to stay, and with your support, and your feedback, we plan to beef it up quite a bit going forward.

For more information on the Connector open-sourcing road map, click here. And did you know Connector is also available in Spanish, German and Italian? To access a local translation, simply choose ‘Your Preferences’ from the Joyent plus-logo menu, then change the ‘Language’ setting under ‘Edit Account’. You are now ready to roll.

Joyent And Textdrive Sitting In A Tree

In January we released Core, a ‘new’ product that combined Joyent’s Collaboration Suite with Strongspace backups and TextDrive’s shared hosting plan. Core was the first big step we took into bringing our 18 companies together (ok, there was only two) all under one roof to make everyone’s lives (that’s yours and mine) much easier to manage, while expanding your plans to ensure you had a bevy of compatible tools to play with, without costing you an arm and a leg.

Six months later, we are taking another huge step – the process of merging the four websites. We realized trying to manage four independent websites was a sure fire way to put grey hair in David’s hair so we had to make a change. Unfortunately, we didn’t catch it fast enough… but I hear salt & pepper locks make most men look distinguished so – no harm, no foul.

Now mind you, this merge is no easy feat and we are taking this step slowly so as not to cause total chaos with our beloved customers. ‘Phase I’ was launched in late February where we combined the bulk of the Strongspace, BingoDisk and the Textdrive sites with Joyent. We also re-introduced Jill, our lovely spokesperson for the Connector product and Terence, who is overseeing things on the Accelerator side. Just who are these people you ask? You’ll just have to watch for the next issue of the newsletter to find out more…

Phase II will entail us blending the rest of the three sites in so all information will be on Joyent.com. We are working behind the scenes on this piece now, and expect the entire transfer to be done early August.

We appreciate your patience with us during this process and we promise to not break too many links. However, if you do find something has gone awry, please do not complete a support ticket – simply shoot an email to kristie [at] joyent [dot] com and we will get it fixed ASAP.

What Is This Thing Called Accelerators?

We have been working hard over the last year, perfecting our special recipe for the on-demand OpenSolaris containers, lovingly known as Joyent Accelerators.

An Accelerator is deployed on Sun Fire X4100s with two dual-core Opterons, 16GB of RAM. This is your dedicated slice of heaven that gives you the freedom to scale up or down, depending on the needs of your application – within seconds. There are no worries of ‘bad neighbors’ on an Accelerator, you control your own environment. Sweet.

We truly believe on-demand computing (Accelerators) is the wave of the future, and recently announced two new Accelerators plans for US$45 and US$75 per month aimed to help developers get into the game faster.

Would you like to know about Accelerators? Check our website or dig into the On-Demand Containers Forum for some helpful tips, tricks and other need-to-know items to make your transition a smooth process.

A Knot Of Vipers: Update On Shared Hosting, Upgrades

In addition to being the title of Dave’s favorite novel (by Mauriac), a knot of vipers vividly describes the struggles the Joyent systems team has been faced with making the transition from FreeBSD to OpenSolaris. We wish to thank those who have been waiting so patiently.

What took so long? First, we’ve had to make sure that hundreds of packages supported on current Shared work on OpenSolaris. Second, we’ve had to ensure that features people depend on with Shared on FreeBSD will continue to work on OpenSolaris. Combined: a real knot of vipers. The finish line appeared tantalizingly close many times only to dissipate with the appearance of some, to quote Mr. Rumsfeld, “unknown unknown”. But we now have clarity. The good news is we are done.

There’s a couple more things Mark and Filip need to check and confirm, some documentation needs to be finished, but two weeks ago we opened Shared on OpenSolaris to a limited number of beta testers, with another group to follow next week. Once things are shaken down, we can finally begin the process of fulfilling the different upgrades that have been on hold and migrate folks from FreeBSD to OpenSolaris.

Your account on the Solaris Shared will continue to be part of your Joyent Connector account and we are planning to do the public release of shared in mid July.

Well folks, how did we do at our first attempt at a newsletter? Did we hit the mark? Leave you wanting more? Wondering how the heck we got your email address? Hopefully you are inspired and ready to answer five (5) short questions, as we would surely love to hear from you. To complete the survey, click here