Triton: Cloud management platform with first class support for containers

Aside from performance: I find the role based access controls far easier to use than, eg. GCP (which likes to claim I don't have access to things even when I'm using an admin account). The firewall is also really easy to use and configure (via the web UI or by defining a simple rule language and setting it up via, eg. Terraform).

My favorite thing hands down is how they handle and use machine metadata though; tags you define in the web UI (or via your infrastructure provisioning mechanism) get shoved onto the machine by zoneinit and then can be used on the machine for configuration, or can show up in the web UI after provisioning (eg. the postgres image uses this to render a "show credentials" button). The service names and what not also can automatically be shoved in DNS (for a simple form of service discovery, although you'll need to implement some form of authentication on top of that since DNS isn't secured), or certain images will automatically trust any public keys you define on your Triton account (I think the SmartOS base-64 image does this, as well as the Debian 9 image).

Unfortunately the documentation for all this is terrible.

EDIT: I left out the other major benefit over some other providers: I can run anything I want, not just supported images. Even if it's something that doesn't fit in an lx zone, they ported KVM over so you can always run, eg. netbsd or whatever in a more traditional virtualized environment. This is great for when you have a few legacy machines left over that aren't using SmartOS or one of their lx- Linux images.

Joyent's cloud (and the open-source software they use to run it!) is notable b/c they don't run containers inside VMs. Instead, they use illumos zones to secure multiple tenants running on a single host os and bare metal server. It sounds like that offers quite an advantage in performance.