

Announcing Joyent Cloud - timf
http://www.joyentcloud.com/2011/09/joyent-announces-the-new-joyent-cloud-sets-new-bar-for-cloud-analytics-performance-and-data-resiliency/

======
Loic
For the EC2/CloudX,Y,Z users here.  Have you compared your cost with the cost
of running your own cloud on top of dedicated servers from a traditional
provider? 

I know that with EC2 you can "follow" your requirements and start/stop
instances, but even by considering a perfect predicting tool which would cut
50% of my instance requirements with EC2, I am still cheaper having 2 times
more hardware than needed with my traditional provider. 

I pay $150/month for the equivalent of a high memory extra large instance.  I
can ask to have them in different data centers all linked together within a
private lan (VLAN).  I look again and again, I never reach the point where it
would be cheaper to run in the "public" cloud.  I run my own cloud with
KVM/Ganeti. 

I think the cloud is nice if you really have a system which can follow your
demand over the day/week but you need to be quite big for it to start to save
you money.  You can go a very long way on a single box...

~~~
EwanToo
If you want just 1 or 2 mid-sized servers running 24x7 with traditional
software on them like an RDMS, AWS is almost entirely the wrong choice. 

A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed to be particularly
reliable. 

The real power of AWS isn't the ability to stop and start cheap instances
quickly, it comes from services like S3 and Elastic Load Balancing, and
SimpleDB. 

If you build your systems on top of these extremely reliable services, you can
achieve uptime much greater than you can achieve with 1 or 2 standalone
servers (whether they've got the word "cloud" in their name or not), while not
spending the massive amounts on high availability or fault tolerance that you
previously had to pay. 

~~~
EponymousCoward
"A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed to be particularly
reliable." 

Source? 

An AWS instance is simply an OS running on a virtualf (xen?)  machine.  On the
largest instances you may in fact be the only virtual machine on the physical
hardware. 

Why would you feel more comfortable running a single instance outside of AWS? 
Your safety is just an illusion.  Your MTTR is out the window.  When you go
down, youll have an outage that goes like this: "we'll be back in a day or two
when I order new hardware and drive it to the colo.  Also, the database will be
time warping to the last backuP 24 hours ago." 

Running on a single machine is never safe and AWS is cheap enough and comes
with enough tools (ELB, RDS, maybe EBS) to allow you to become truly redundant
and single fault tolerant. 

~~~
rkalla
> "A single AWS instance is not reliable, and isn't designed > to be
> particularly reliable."  > Source? 

Reading the AWS EC2 forums for any length of time or launching your own EC2
instances into production and watching them fall over from time to time. 

All arbitrary, but I don't think anyone that has deployed on EC2 with more
than a handful of servers would ever describe it as an overly stable service. 

> Why would you feel more comfortable running a single instance outside of
> AWS?  Your safety is just an illusion. 

In theory, absolutely agree.  It sounds like you were agreeing with the OP to
be honest, but just getting pedantic about single-AWS instance vs single-
dedicated instance in another hosting company. 

Sure, best practices dictate trusting a single point of failure is not a good
idea. 

In practice, my dedicated deployments (at RimuHosting if that matters) are
infinitely more stable than my EC2 deployments and I think that data point is
worth _something_ \-- not going to bet the farm on it, but I'm also not going
to treat my dedicated servers like I would flaky EC2 VMs. 

> Running on a single machine is never safe and AWS is cheap enough and comes
> with enough tools (ELB, RDS, maybe EBS) to allow you to become truly
> redundant and single fault tolerant. 

You are agreeing with the EwanToo from what I can tell...

------
rkalla
Interesting, so they are comparing to the OnDemand pricing of AWS, not
including that 3-year reserved instances on AWS are somewhere in the ballpark
of 48% cheaper, BUT, they have this footnote at the bottom of the pricing page
that seems like a really interesting differentiating approach[1]:

    
    
        No Charge For Data Transfer Up To 20TB Per Month Per
        Account.  100TB free data transfer for customers over 
        500GB memory
    

On AWS, 20TB == 2,000GB * $0.10/GB (avg) = $200

and I suppose if you have enough SmartMachines on lease that you are pushing
500GB+ total of memory in your account, they up that to 100TB of transfer. 

It looks like overages are a fairly reasonable $0.08/GB[2]

I think we are finally witnessing bandwidth becoming a race-to-0 for big cloud
providers and I love it (I know there have been prediction-papers here on HN
before about how it will eventually become free or near-free, it is just
interesting to see the different ways we can get there).  Best of luck to
Joyent and it's great to see another strong competitor in this area! 

ASIDE: Anyone have a geographical map of the data center locations you can
deploy in the Joyent Cloud?  One of the big appeals of AWS is having decent
global coverage and I am trying to find more information about that form their
site with no luck at the moment...

UPDATE: For anyone interested, just got this back from the Joyent team about
the location of the data centers:

    
    
      We launched today with two datacenters.   WEST is in 
      Emeryville CA and SW is Las Vegas NV. 
      
      Inside of my.joyentcloud.com you will have a choice of 
      datacenters when provisioning a server. 
    
    

[1] [http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing-
comparison/smart...](http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing-
comparison/smartos-linux/)

[2] <http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/smartmachines-2/options/>

------
timf
Performance claims and DTrace support aside, the costs are similar for
instance-hours for low to medium-sized instances. 

But completely different if you are doing more than 15GB of outgoing
bandwidth: _"No Charge For Data Transfer Up To 20TB Per Month Per Account"_

[http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing-
comparison/smart...](http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing-
comparison/smartos-linux/)

------
mhd
As their default (and quite interesting) offering is SmartOS, I'd like to ask
if someone has some recent experience with (Open)Solaris networking.  I still
remember the day when it (especially its x86 incarnation) was renowned for
having syscalls that were slow as molasses – IIRC, actually a big boon for the
then-fledgling Linux. 

How does it fare at memory allocation, especially under load?  How good is
their select successor (i.e. their equivalent to epoll/kqueue)? 

~~~
diolpah
As I recently discovered, you cannot run a software firewall of any kind
inside a solaris container.  Everything else about SmartOS seems quite great to
me, but my evaluation term was limited. 

~~~
trevoro
Actually that is not the case.  In SmartOS you have two options for networking. 
You can run a zone in "IP exclusive" mode which will give the zone full
control over its networking stack.  This means you can run a firewall or even
change the IP addresses, etc from within the zone.  SmartOS makes that apply to
VMs as well.  There are also anti-spoof mechanisms built into the OS to ensure
that you dont get unfriendly neighbours. 

Here is a rough overview:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris_Network_Virtualizat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSolaris_Network_Virtualization_and_Resource_Control)

------
g123g
Looks like a good competitor for AWS.  I think as a customer it is always good
to have some high quality competition amongst the vendors.  This will push AWS
to try to replicate or better the features being offered by them and also keep
them from raising their prices too much. 

The list of customers for the joyent cloud looks quite impressive.  So this
might already have been tested quite thoroughly by these customers and doesn't
look like as if it is launching just now. 

I think they should introduce a free tier like AWS's micro instance to allow
ppl to test drive this new cloud. 

------
foobarbazetc
[http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing/smartmachine-
pri...](http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing/smartmachine-pricing/) ->
404. 

~~~
jyap
This is a better link (not the comparison to EC2 pricing):
<http://www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing-2/smartos-linux/>

~~~
timf
That's a worse link to me, mostly because they don't include the "Joyent Cloud
Advantages" section like in the EC2 comparison.  Those are very relevant
points, especially 20TB bandwidth per month. 

------
sciurus
Their regular pricing page and their EC2 comparison page don't seem to match. 
One example - On the regular pricing page, XL has 32GB of memory, 760GB of
disk, and costs $1.12 per hour.  On their EC2 comparison page, in two places XL
has 16GB of memory, 480GB of disk, and costs $0.64 per hour.  In another place
on that page it has 8GB of RAM and 240GB of disk and costs $0.64 per hour. 

------
mmahemoff
Pricing page is 404.  Cached here, though obscuring the lower end of the price
range:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y7ZEmSC...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y7ZEmSCDbJQJ:www.joyentcloud.com/products/pricing/smartmachine-
pricing/)

------
braindead_in
I was looking for details on SmartOS.  What is it and what does it run? 

~~~
jbellis
SmartOS is the OpenSolaris fork. 

<http://www.joyent.com/products/smartos/>

<https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live>

~~~
nosequel
In addition, from what I know, Joyent has hired many of the original
contributors to solaris and opensolaris (and now SmartOS). 

------
yusufg
Does Joyent count inbound traffic as part of its bandwidth calculation or does
it offer free like AWS ? 

------
rorrr
So the prices are pretty much identical to Amazon EC2.  Why would anybody
choose an unknown player versus somebody very experienced like Amazon? 

~~~
dmpk2k
There are some notable names running on Joyent's infrastructure.  They could
have used AWS instead, but they didn't.  I don't know if that means anything
though, since there are odd ducks in every crowd. 

One thing I like about Joyent is they're not trying to solve hard-to-
impossible problems like Amazon (e.g. EBS), but rather realistic and immediate
problems (e.g. guaranteed disk latency).  For all EBS's promises, the latter is
vastly more important to me; I've had few problems EBS would solve, and a
truckload that higher-quality I/O would. 

Also, those analytics are nothing to sneeze at.  That's worth almost as much as
the IO. 

~~~
rorrr
If you really care about low latency, get a dedicated server.  You will even
get better specs if you spend the same money.  There are amazing deals out
there, like this one:

<https://robot.your-server.de/order>

~~~
pjriot
This is all desktop hardware.  Its not the same thing. 

------
schiptsov
Qemu-KVM + SPL + puppet + some monitoring?  Yeah, Amazon should start looking
for a PANIC-button.  ^_^

Update: Oh, come on.  I've clicked to the TECHNOLOGY link and what I saw
instead of technology review is load of BS.  SmartMachines?  OK, even I know
that one should market any crap with Smart or Easy or Eco or LowFat prefix in
it, because, you now, I have a SmartMachine... OK, fine.  But what about
technology? 

Instead of writing that you're building a solution based on fast, light-
weight, low-overhead, in-kernel, native virtualization system and RedHat
supported libvirt stack, that you're co-sponsoring and actively participating
in development process, and here is our contribution and so on, I see loads of
BS.  KVM is faster than Xen?  I know that, thank you.  I have a KVM instances
running on my Laptop.  ^_^

You're using ZFS?  Linux native port?  FUSE?  So, you're active developer and
tester?  Co-sponsor?  You have hired or supporting active developers?  Providing
a feedback to community?  No?  You just trying to sell me something you called a
SmartMachine, OK, fine.  I don't buy it.  ^_^

~~~
piotrSikora
SmartMachines == OpenSolaris / SmartOS (their IllumuOS-based distribution). 

Also, they are actively developing and co-sponsoring IllumOS (and are IMHO the
only reason why it didn't die yet), so next time do some research before
bashing on a good company. 

~~~
schiptsov
Point taken, thank you! 

So, if it OpenSolaris based, then nothing to see here.  Community is too small. 
Who will write and test up-to-date drivers for all new hardware that vendors
are pushing to the market each half-of-year? 

~~~
spooneybarger
Why should that matter for cloud hosting?  If you wanted to be able to install
OpenSolaris on random hardware it might matter.  But this is a closed
environment where you never see the underlying hardware. 

~~~
schiptsov
If it will be a closed platform, it doesn't matter. 

I had a lot of experience with Solaris (x86 only - people tried to run
Informix/Oracle on a cheap hardware) starting from Solaris 7 and onwards.  It
was always a problem even to install it.  And lack of working compiler makes
things even worse. 

Starting from Solaris 10 they did a lot of work to improve the overall
experience, but too late - everyone migrated to Linux to run the same crap. 

And I must say, that after it was installed and tuned it was running quite
stable as a database server and it can deal with heavy loads, while similar
Linux instances failed now and then.  But it was 5 years ago.  Modern Linux
kernels can handle everything quite well.