Joyeur Bytes - June 2007
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