Joyent

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Side of Mayo: Episode 1

By David Young 12 April 07

Mark Mayo on:

  • Why does Joyent use F5 load balancers?
  • How F5 load balancers help us make mongrels better
  • F5 iRules
  • Solaris and iSCSI: the problems with the iSCSI target
  • Solaris and the dual license (CDDL and GPL): the problems for the development community
  • Does the Linux community care about what’s happening in OpenSolaris?
  • The reason to be license compatible with Linux? Device drivers.

Think of this podcast as meditation.

Here’s a link to the mp3.


  1. Thanks for the headsup on the F5s – they sound very close to the NetScalers we use at the Uni – content switching, high level health checks, etc.

    — Dick Davies    496 days ago    #

  2. Hey Mark, glad you like our products. If you haven’t already, you should jump over to our developer site (http://devcentral.f5.com) where you can get everything you ever wanted to know about iRules and iControl. We’ve got Code Sharing, Forums, wikis, blogs and tutorials.

    Oh, and Mr. Davies, I won’t hold anything against you for being a customer for a competitor B-). I’d suggest you visit the site as well and see for yourself how we compare to your current solution.

    Cheers!

    -Joe

    — Joe Pruitt    495 days ago    #

  3. Wow. No interruptions. I like the free-wheeling nature of the regular ps | grep to a point, but I would like to hear BenR finish a though now and again (especially if it’s a technical one). Thanks!

    — Geoff    495 days ago    #

  4. one of the more level-headed analyses of the opensolaris/cddl/gpl/linux controversy i’ve come across. what a breath of fresh air to hear someone address this topic in a non-reactionary manner.

    thanks Mark. i’m looking forward to hearing more from you in the future.

    — David M. Besonen    494 days ago    #

  5. Very clear headed statement about Solaris vs Linux. Good job.

    Do you think the iscsi target has improved in b61? Or should I be thinking about Linux again?

    — Nicholas Lee    494 days ago    #

  6. I’ve been using BigIP’s in production since 2000 and they’ve never let me down. We had several HA+ pairs at my previous employer and I loved them. They allowed us to grow our site from a few thousand page views a day to millions by allowing us to scale out horizontally without much effort. The state checking allowed us to survive a server failure gracefully with minimal impact to customers. I haven’t been able to find a better layer 7 load balancer, so although they are pricey there’s really no substitute. I can’t say enough good things about them.

    — Cody Swanson    493 days ago    #

  7. Nicholas: The target is getting better, absolutely, but if you check the storage-discuss mailing list you’ll see that there’s still issues with b61. Several big bugs have been fixed, though, so depending on what you want to do with it the glitches people are reporting against b61 may not be a big deal for you.

    — Mark Mayo    490 days ago    #

  8. Looking for an easy-to-use RSS and Atom reader for your Mac? You’ve found it! The “Eddy” award-winning NetNewsWire has a familiar three-paned interface and can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs.

    — fahed    326 days ago    #

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