Joyent – Yes Virginia, There Is A Hybrid Cloud #cloudcomputing

I got a chance to spend time with James Duncan and Bryan Bogensberger of Joyent at #e2conf today.  I’ve always been a little bit cloudy on what Joyent actually does.  Their Web site (which is getting a makeover) is not all that clear today.

Let’s take a look at their stack as they described it to me this afternoon.

Accelerators – these are roughly equivalent to Amazon’s EC2 instances, though with a lot of compelling differences (if you’re using/considering EC2, you should check out Joyent).

“Cloud Control” – this is not a product per se, but it’s their management interface into their Accelerators.

Smart – this is their Javascript-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering from Joyent’s acquisition of Reasonably Smart (where James and Bryan hail from). The value of Smart to Joyent is as a feature of their stack, and not as a compelling standalone solution. It’s going to be open-sourced so you can run the Smart PaaS offering inside your firewall. I’m a bit dubious on whether or not they will see much adoption, but perhaps it will kick butt.

The Hybrid Cloud

What struck me as totally unique and compelling about Joyent was an aside comment that they have a couple clients today running the Joyent Cloud Control management interface across both internal (IT-controlled) and external (Joyent-controlled) infrastructure. The net effect is that, to the IT user, their own servers and Joyent’s accelerators combine for a seamless and burstable hybrid cloud.

Effectively, your servers are “joined” to the cloud. This is my “marketecture” view from my conversation with James and Bryan, and what they end up releasing may look very different. But if what they say is true, they may be one of the first to have actually deployed a hybrid cloud into production. That’s huge – like Santa Claus is Real kind of huge!