The original (and only) dtrace.conf in 2008 was a smash hit – even the analysts were raving! In pace with the Olympiad, it’s time once again to bring the community together for dtrace.conf 2012! This Joyent-sponsored community event will be held in downtown San Francisco (likely SoMA, but exact venue TBD) on Tuesday, April 3rd. Note that there may be a small attendance fee to help defray costs.

As with the inaugural dtrace.conf, this will be a technical conference for people who are using DTrace, expanding its boundaries, and contributing to its growth and health. This will be done in unconference style, so every attendee should come prepared to present or otherwise lead a discussion or session. Note that “just using DTrace” is more than sufficient for leading a discussion or session: if you’re ready to talk about what you found in technical detail – and how DTrace helped you (or didn’t!) – we would love for you to join us at dtrace.conf.

Register here.

We’re pleased to announce that Joyent has some new investors. Weather Investment II and Telefonica Digital have together invested $85 million into Joyent. We’d like to welcome Weather II and it’s advising company Accelero, along with Telefonica Digital, to the Joyent family.

How will the new funds be spent, you may ask? Please read the press release here, and we’ll link to some of the stories that emerge today.

Photo by DonkeyHotey

Earlier this week you may have seen word from Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie or the Interoperability Team at Microsoft, but today the Azure team released their announcement regarding Node on Windows Azure and the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js. After many months of hard work between the Azure team and the core team here at Joyent on the port of Node and npm, we’re seeing Node’s first appearance in Microsoft’s products. For Joyent and the Node community, this is yet another strong statement regarding the maturity and enterprise-readiness that Node has achieved. Providing a first-class experience for Node developers on Windows is like strapping space shuttle solid rocket boosters to a technology that was already shattering airspeed records for community growth and enthusiasm. You will have the opportunity to hear more about Node from Microsoft’s perspective from Scott Guthrie himself in late January at the Node Summit.

Ryan Dahl, Engineer at Joyent and creator of Node, also chimes in on the importance of this achievement.

We’re down in Santa Clara for the annual MongoSV show and simultaneously announcing the launch of our brand new SmartMachine for MongoDB. This new virtual machine comes pre-loaded with a fully tuned, optimized, and ready to deploy instance of MongoDB, the NoSQL database that is becoming a key player in mobile, e-commerce, game and other responsive, low-latency applications. The growth of the MongoDB community has been extremely rapid as more people have come to embrace NoSQL data stores for modern Web application and DIRTY (data-intensive, real-time) uses.

In discussions we also heard many devs talk about how MongoDB and Node.js (the application environment of which Joyent is a corporate steward) play so well together with javascript, JSON, and other nice matches that make mating the two ridiculously easy to pull off. MongoDB running on top of Joyent’s SmartOS SmartMachine brings a lot of additional goodies including:

• On-the-fly resizing of the database with no reboot or service interruption
• Bursting of up to 800% at not extra charge to keep the database responding smoothly, even under extreme loads
• DTrace-driven analytics for mapping latency outliers in four-dimensional heat maps rather than fighting through logs or staring at graphs or charts that hide the bad actors

And this is where Circonus comes in as a Joyent partner. Circonus provides organization-wide unified monitoring across a wide variety of critical parameters spanning an organization’s entire infrastructure constellation. In a nutshell, they make it much easier for ops teams to spot problems and monitor performance (They also work in partnership with another key Joyent Cloud partner, application and server monitoring service New Relic and the two services are quite complementary).

It’s all part of the growing DevOps ecosystem that we at Joyent see as a key piece of the future for cloud computing. (It also ties in with our own Cloud Analytics product for highly granular root cause analysis and application tuning- another complementary offering). So you’ll be hearing a lot about this from us going forward as the concept of DevOps continues to evolve and tools around it continue to evolve with it. Circonus is currently offering a special incentive to Joyent Cloud clients — the Circonus Copper plan free for a full 90 days. Joyent Cloud clients can take advantage of this promotion here – http://circonus.com/partners/joyent/sign-up. It’s a great deal and we are always open to any feedback you may have about our partner services. Thanks for reading!

Earlier today Joyent Founder and CTO Jason Hoffman and Isobe-san, CEO of Yahoo! Japan subsidiary First Server, announced the launch of First Server’s SmartDataCenter-powered public cloud service, named Z Cloud, at a press conference in Tokyo.

Isobe-san also unveiled First Server’s Node.js service, named Node Ninja, just in time for NodeFest (also known as 東京Node学園祭2011), a conference of Node.js developers in Japan.

Photo Credit Publickey Blog by Junichi Niino

We’re proud to introduce our cloud software customers today in this announcement. As you can see from the map above, our customers are spread across the globe. Despite the geographic diversity, at least one thing they have in common is their use of SmartDataCenter to provide cloud services to their customers.

Thank you ClusterTech, First Server, MiTAC Information Technology, NavLink, Uniserve, Libero, Servus, and AniseAsia, for using SmartDataCenter to provide the best available cloud software and services to your existing and future customers around the world.

We are pleased to welcome a new customer-partner to our global community of service providers running Joyent-powered clouds: NavLink.

NavLink is an AT&T affiliate based in the Middle East and providing managed Information Communication Technology (ICT), enterprise networking and cloud services to telecom operators and medium and large enterprises in over 17 countries throughout EMEA.

The folks at NavLink plan to use Joyent’s SmartDataCenter to provide their enterprise customers with public cloud services, and to license SmartDataCenter to their telecom customers throughout the region.

Welcome, NavLink! We look forward to working with you.

Read the full story here.

Don’t let the size fool you: MiCloud is built using the most modern, efficient, and performant hardware, software and networking available today. You can read more about what powers it here.

(That’s Jason, second from the left.)

For Joyent customers serving apps and games on Facebook, there may be several steps you need to take in addition to the authentication changes outlined above:

• All apps have to be served via HTTPS. Facebook apps can’t have segregated HTTP and HTTPS, so all apps may have to switch to encrypted protocols. Depending on whether you are running your Facebook application on one server, or a distributed architecture, the steps you need to take may be different.
• Generally, single server apps with moderate traffic loads won’t require any infrastructure changes. The extra processing load for SSL will be taken care of by the automatic CPU bursting offered on the Joyent Cloud.
• Applications with high I/O should consider increasing the SmartMachine size for a larger CPU allocation, or adding a Zeus Load Balancer and off-load SSL encryption/decryption.
• Customers who are already using our Zeus ZXTM traffic controller solution can handle the implementation of SSL across their all of their web servers from one centralized console and SSL management source. This mitigates the need to add compute nodes or capacity. The documentation on the Zeus website is fairly easy to follow.
• If you don’t have an SSL certificate, there are many vendors that sell secure certificates and have instructions on how to enable SSL on your app/website. There are no IP space changes involved – you just have to ensure that the SSL certificates match your domain names. Also traffic will flow to port 443 rather than port 80 and SSL certificates add an extra encryption/decryption process to all I/O.
• If you have media assets or objects stored separately on edge services like a CDN (Content Distribution Network), you may have to use a CDN SSL service so you don’t serve mixed SSL/non-SSL pages. Contact your CDN administrator for more information and to discuss the requirement and pricing.
• To simplify cross-browser compatibility, consider ending support for browsers with older security protocols, such as anything older than IE 7.x, Firefox 5.x and Safari 3.x

If you’re still unclear how to do prepare for the upcoming Facebook changes or need a little help, just file a request with support@joyent.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE: One more link on the Facebook Forums regarding SSL Certificates that may be useful.