Joyent: Then and Now

Here in Silicon “blink and you might miss something” Valley, we spend a lot of time talking about the present and predicting the future, but not a whole lot of time reminiscing about the past. However, in honor of President’s Day this past Monday, we realized we might also benefit from learning a little bit about the present by revisiting history and reflecting on the past.

To be sure, Joyent has changed as it has grown over the past eight years - primarily in the areas of innovation and technology. But in some ways, we’ve stayed the same. As our product has evolved, we’ve maintained a steady commitment to our mission and ethos, and our core values have remained the same. As we think back to the past and look to the future, here are some of the values that have guided our growth, strategy and vision.

Pushing the Boundaries of What’s Possible

The first of our core values is our commitment to the advancement of cloud computing. Back in 2008, cloud computing was relatively new and unchartered territory and IaaS was anything but a mainstream concept. We established a spot for ourselves on the cutting edge of virtualization and cloud technology simply by being in the space at all.

Today, cloud computing has simply become the way things are done. But there are still endless possibilities waiting to be realized and Joyent’s growth reflects our mission to help the entire industry continue to reach new economies of scale that only cloud computing can make possible.

Commitment to Open Source

There are certainly good business reasons for our commitment to open source projects, but even more importantly is the sense of community and commitment to innovation it builds. Our open source work began with the Connector Collaboration Suite and has continued through to SmartOS. SmartOS is the first OS to unify DTrace, ZFS, Zones and KVM under one OS kernel. We believe this gives a great advantage for cloud computing, but part of our work is to build a community of users around it. That means offering educational resources, creating an awesome experience for developers.

And we bring that commitment to exploration, education and building and nurturing communities into the way we work with customers.

Understanding Devops Through Dialogue

Since the early days of Joyent, our customers have been telling us consistently that we understand the needs of both devs and IT professionals. Our customers often comment that Joyent’s unique approach to cloud computing provides not just the bulletproof infrastructure, software, and services their business requires to be success but also an ongoing creative problem-solving dialogue between our technical team and theirs. They consistently tell us that this relationship is is the reason they choose and have stuck with Joyent.

Big Data and the Future

At the end of the day, we’re really about empowering our customers to do amazing things and continue their own innovation. For that, we know one of the most important things they need is better tools to work with big data. So we’re contintuin to create new offerings that help people to take advantage of their data whether that’s projects node.js, Hadoop and Nodestack is all getting us closer to a better understanding and better offering.

We’re getting there by staying true to the principles we’ve had since the early days and by innovating, providing leadership, and working closely with customers who are transforming the world through their awesome technology.



Post written by rachelbalik