Google's recent release of App Engine and Amazon's success with EC2 and S3 are apparently bothering the kind folks at Joyent, who pushed out a press release extolling the root access they provide to their virtual machines, and decrying the lack of choice that the competing platforms provide.
Which is kinda funny, because Joyent requires that you run on Solaris. I have nothing against Solaris – I'm sure it's a fine operating system – but I also have nothing for it, and few people who are aching to work on it. EC2 gives you a choice of linux distros, and lets you control image deployment yourself in realtime (without waiting days). And yes, you do get root. So, what's the point again?
All of that having been said, Joyent provides a good, stable service, and I'm a customer. They could instead do a good job of pointing out what is special about their service. But Joyent's flackish attempt at PR differentiation is an embarrassment, a failed attempt to get some press in the firestorm surrounding the Google App Engine release.
Note: I left a much nicer comment along these lines on Joyent's blog, but I guess they didn't think it was too funny, because they deleted it. So why have a comments section at all? Cowards. If they want PR Newswire, they should use it – not a blog. (Besides, maybe they'd spell-check for them.)
Turns out they probably didn't delete my post, but their blog has a cute feature: you post a comment and it appears immediately, but if you refresh the page it is gone. Then later (maybe after moderation?) it appears again. No "moderating your ill-considered flames" or "standby while the gerbils spin": comment is there, then it's gone. Then it's back, apparently.
Kudos to Kristie, the nice salesperson who responded.
4 comments:
Hey Chuck,
Solid words. I hear you loud and clear.
A key focus of mine is to work towards telling the Joyent story better; why use us, what developers are doing on our platform, the benefits of open standards, etc. You will start seeing a lot more of that track than how we are different than Google or AWS.
As for the comment - I checked. Nothing there to be deleted. There is a comment from a Chuck at the top of the post, is that yours? If not, our commenting system is a little wonky in that you hit 'preview' then you 'publish', so sometimes people miss the second part.
I welcome your comments, even a restatement of the above (no need to change for us). I have been in Sales for 20+ years so I have pretty thick skin...
Be well.
I'm impressed. Not only a sales person handling your stuff on their site, but a follow through to YOUR site. Major good customer service.
Stands in stark contrast to my Verizon nightmare this week.
Yes, they're very good at responding on public fora. Modern companies are getting very savvy on how they communicate openly with customers -- a quick response to an unhappy customer turns a potentially smelly situation positive very quickly.
Hey Chuck,
My name is Rod Boothby. I lead the Evangelism Team at Joyent.
There a few technical reasons why we go with OpenSolaris rather than any version of Linux.
From a developer's perspective, the first and most important is DTrace. DTrace is simply the most powerful debugging and optimization tool out there. Because it is integrated with the kernel, we are limited to specific OS. OpenSolaris is one of those options.
We have seen many developers increase the performance of their applications from 10X to 50X after using DTrace to find some particularly complex and unexpected bottle necks. The most well know was a Ruby exception that was 45 frames deep within a Rails app. No one knew it was there. The exception was slowing down a very common query.
Before doing the DTrace and then adjusting the code, the query took something like 700ms to 1,500ms.
After doing the DTrace and then adjusting the code, the query took something like 15ms to 90ms.
- Rod
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