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Node.JS and Joyent Agreement

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54 pointsrafaelc16 comments

Is Joyent any good? I was one of the original "VC"s on TextDrive where they sold a lifetime account for $400 back in '04. For the two years I tried to use that account there was a never ending string of technical problems that was swept under the rug by a rabid fanboy contingent in the forums. It left such a bad taste in my mouth that even today I doubt their technical competence even though their platform is completely different.

The early days (I remember you!) were pretty rough, yeah. Since they switched everything to Solaris, though, it's all been seemingly rock-solid. Only thing is that I really don't use that big lifetime VPS I have with them (still use the shared-hosting account for some static file stuff and side projects though), because I hate adminning Solaris... :(

"Good" is subjective. I've had a 1GB accelerator with them basically forever. Here are a few points.

1. Their pricing is absurdly high, as cloud providers go. They are roughly double for equivalent* offerings.

* = "equivalent" is tough to qualify, since hardly anybody offers solaris zones.

2. They don't seem to have much interest in migrating exiting customers over to their "my joyent" self-provisioning system.

3. They have been delivering 100% availability since I've been with them, which is going on 3 years now. I've never experienced this with any other provider, ever.

4. Performance is better than I would have expected.

We've been using their Smart Javascript Platform (based on SpiderMonkey) for the past year. They are supposed to be migrating that platform to Node.js soon. The last outage we had was 236 days ago. Our current uptime for the past year is 99.968%. We also began using Smart Machines 3 months ago in Emeryville, CA and Andover, MA data centers and so far have 99.999% availability on those.

http://www.joyent.com/technology/smartplatform/

I'm really not sure how I feel about this. I've been churning it over and over in my mind since I heard about this via the grapevine whilst in my favourite bar tonight. The only thing I've left with thinking is this: for better or worse, Node is the most successful CommonJS platform available today. Server-side JS should thrive, but I'm not sure Node is the thing to do it.

Node, to me, feels like it's the thing that JavaScript the language should be on the client-side; JavaScript on the server-side is beholden to the slow pace of the client-side and is not developing the things it needs, at the pace it needs.

I can't help but feel that JavaScript is the wrong match for this. Maybe Clojure is better. Maybe something else is. I just can't ignore this gut feeling that thing isn't write with this picture.

What bars do you go to where people discuss server-side javascript frameworks?

What specific issues do you have with Javascript?

Great move by Joyent. I just hope Ryan got a fair deal here.

Maturity is a good thing.

why would anyone want to be the next php?

Because it's deployed on nearly every web server and has ubiquity. If you're building a web app and you want people to be able to run, chances are good if you build it in PHP, people can run it. Would be nice to say the same thing about server-side JS.

Because nobody wants to be the next Rails.

I think I'm lost on the joke; nobody wants to be the next overhyped (and polarizing) framework that is beloved by a large niche of programmers and launches a new segment of the industry?

Care to clue me in? (being honest; maybe I missed some news recently)

php sucks

I think he means Ubiquity when he refers PHP. Not necessarily technical.

because it is a cinch for sysadmins like me to support in a bureaucratic IT environment

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