I’ve got the best users hands down. I’m really proud of the work of Mr. Mark Cornick and his recent Mongrel, meet SMF; SMF, meet Mongrel blog entry in which he shares his excellent manifest for handling Mongrel’s as a service under SMF, including Capistrano tasks. This manifest first popped up in the TextDrive Containers Forum after I posted a HOWTO for users interested in harnessing the power of SMF, which I’m fairly proud of: HOWTO: Solaris SMF & Startup Scripts, How to be reboot ready.

We’re doing a lot of great things at Joyent. I highly encourage Solaris users to keep an eye on our forums, particularly for anyone using, developing, or deploying Ruby on Rails. I really think that Joyent On-Demand Containers are the premier Ruby on Rails deployment platform of choice. And I’m glad to report to those who thought that $250 was too steep that we now offer a third tier of service at the $125 level, which buys you 1/16th of a max’ed out Sun Fire X4100 (4 2.4Ghz Opteron Cores running OpenSolaris B43 with 16GB of ECC Memory, 10GB of NFS mass storage hosted RAIDZ2 on a Thumper via aggregated gigabit ethernet providing >100MB/s performance).

One of the reasons I enjoy working at Joyent so much is that I’m bringing the optimism and capability of Sun solutions and OpenSolaris to the real world of Ruby on Rails developers. Pairing up what OpenSolaris can do with what Rails developers need is a great place to be for an evangelist like me. One thing TextDrive has always had, and I’m glad to help continue, is a thriving and vocal user community thats always looking for new possibilities and new opportunities. Dreamhost might be cheaper, 1and1 might be bigger, but Joyent has got it where it really counts.