SmartOS
After more than 8 years, yesterday was my last day at Joyent. I was asked by David Young & Jason Hoffman to join Joyent in 2006. At the time the idea of "utility computing" was being talked about but "grid" was really the domain of academic super computers for large batch computation. The industry solutions for off-prem computing at the time was either shared hosting (such as what Jason's TextDrive was offering) or buying dedicated ...
There are many challenges associated with building applications in the cloud. One of the most challenging is that the cloud properly exploited is inherently transient. This means that your development environment must also be transient, such that you never depend on unfounded assumptions. Once upon a time you would routinely re-install your OS to ensure you weren't mistakenly assuming something were present. Moving development to a VM with a ...
If you've never heard of iPXE, it is the official fork of gPXE, which was the ultimate result of the Etherboot Project of old. Apparently there was a power struggle that caused the primary contributors to leave Etherboot/gPXE and they renamed gPXE to iPXE to distinguish. Technically gPXE still exists, but for all intents and purposes its a dead project. If you are completely unfamiliar with both iPXE and gPXE let me summarize. The ...
Over the last couple days I added a bunch of SmartOS documentation on getting the major configuration management solutions working. Pointers for CFengine3 and Puppet are there with the basics on getting started. I added extensive documentation for Chef, suitable for even users entirely new to Chef. I've also populated a Github repo with cookbooks, Knife bootstraps, and a full framework for using Chef Solo with SmartOS. Go find all the docs ...
This Thursday night, Aug 16th at 7:30PM in Joyent's HQ (9th Floor, Embarcadero One) Joyent will be hosting BayLISA for an evening of SmartOS. I'll be filling in for Ryan Nelson, talking for 20 mins about the practical issues of SmartOS deployment. This is an excellent opportunity for any Solaris or SmartOS fans in the Bay Area to come an meet some amazing engineers and learn more about the future of the platform. Register here. (If I ...