Hacker News Reader

Comment by Negative1 | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance but can someone explain how Joyent's acquisition moves Samsung towards their strategic objectives? In other words, how are they going to exploit this technology (and brain gain)?

View on HN

From the CTO's blog post, it seems to me that Samsung became interested in Joyent not for its most famous product, Node.js, but for its new product, Manta, which is some sort of serverless, distributed, data-storage and processing service (https://www.joyent.com/manta). Manta might be well-suited for the new hotness, the Internet of Things.

So that's how I saw it progressing. Samsung was looking into how to get in on the Internet of Things, stumbled across Manta, and it went from there.

Manta seems like they are throwing the kitchen sink at those problems, tons of containers, proprietary OS, proxies, etc.

If you want to store objects in a distributed way, why not just use something like RethinkDB, which has proxying/sharding etc. built in? RethinkDB even has a way to execute code with 'js'.

Or for serverless processing, why not AWS lambda or the crop of clones?

Manta doesn't run on a proprietary OS, but runs on SmartOS, a distribution of illumos [1][2]. In fact, almost everything at Joyent is open source, including all of Manta [3]. As for why not anything else, Manta has been around since 2013 [4], before other similar solutions, and allows you to run arbitrary programs on your data. As an example, some of our customers run ffmpeg on videos that they upload, to produce different variants to then store in Manta.

[1] https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live

[2] https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent

[3] https://github.com/joyent/manta

[4] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/25/joyent_object_store/

For the record, there is no "proprietary [operating system]" involved here. The Triton stack (upon which Manta is based) runs on top of SmartOS[1], a wholly open source operating system built around an illumos[2] core.

[1] https://www.joyent.com/smartos

[2] https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate

> proprietary OS

Say what? SmartOS is based on illumos, the only free, open source SVR4 UNIX out there.

Get the code: https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent

Build it! https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Building+SmartOS+on+Sma...

Modify it: https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Developers+Guid...

> Or for serverless processing, why not AWS lambda or the crop of clones?

Data locality.

Samsung generates a lot of sensor/IoT type of data (e.g. smart phones, smart TVs, medical, industrial). They'll need the infrastructure to process and store all these data.

I have the same reaction, for me samsung is more a hardware company and the software they make is only to support their hardware. So is all future Joyent software development will be close sourced and only used by Samsung?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com