Joyent customers are so smart and articulate. That’s why we invited them to speak on the Joyent sponsor panel at Node Summit on Tuesday. Why listen to us when our customers can tell the story of using Node.js better than we can?

We taped the panel, so here’s their conversation about why they decided to use Node in their businesses. (Not a great view but the sound’s good! [MP3])

The session was moderated by John Rymer, Forrester Research analyst and expert on enterprise middleware. John had some good questions.

Customers Colin Rand, Associate Director of Technology at AKQA, Glen Lougheed, CEO of NodeFly Systems, and Jevon MacDonald, Co-Founder and CEO of GoInstant had a fantastic conversation about how they considered using Node.js from a business standpoint, and what it’s like to use a new technology that changes the way we think about how applications work for us.

Have a look or a listen.

While talking to fellow Node.js enthusiasts in San Francisco for Node Summit this week, we asked what seems like a simple question: “What is Node?” We got answers ranging from the basic but technical to the detailed but metaphorical, and provided by a wide range of experts from companies of all sizes working in a number of different fields. Going to show that through the power of simplicity, Node.js promises a wealth of opportunity.

Here are some of the people who answered the question:

Eric Meijjer, Iconoclast, Microsoft
Isaac Schlueter, npm creator and engineer, Joyent
Rik Arends, CTO , Cloud9
Derek Collison, CTO and Chief Architect, VMWare
John Rymer, VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Glen Loughheed, CEO, NodeFly
Colin Rand, Associate Director of Technology, AKQA
Adam Bragg, Tagalong
Hunter Loftis, Director of Engineering at ClickDummy
Ben Lowenstein, Co-Founder of Colingo
Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, Vice President, Platform Architect, Yahoo!
Paul Serby, CTO, Clock Limited
Charlie Robbins, CEO, Nodejitsu
Paul Baumgart,  Founder, ProxV

We here at Joyent have been looking forward to Node Summit for months now, and wanted to send one last reminder that you can join us tonight for some pre-summitting at the ThirstyBear Brewing Company from 6:00pm to 9:00pm — and since we just got a new round of funding, we’ll be picking up the tab. Just let us know you’re coming.

Of course, you can also find us at the Mission Bay Conference Center for Node Summit proper tomorrow and Wednesday. And there are still a few badges left if you haven’t registered yet for the conference!

Ruben Daniels, CEO of Cloud9, the online environment for the development of JavaScript and HTML5 applications, has a great post over on the Cloud9 blog about all of the initiatives the company is undertaking to nurture and support the Node.js community. Take a look a the new community blog Nodebits.org, the official Node manual site Nodemanual.org, and the place for Cloud9 IDE and Node.js training.

You can catch Ruben at Node Summit on Wednesday, participating in a panel titled PaaS Services and Tools.

Congratulations on your valuable initiatives, Cloud9 team.

2012 marks a new chapter in Book of Node as hundreds of developers and business leaders come together for the first Node Summit in San Francisco on January 24th and 25th. Headlining the mobile panel, Jason Delker, Director of Product Development for Sprint, will speak about Sprint’s plans for fostering the growing developer community as well as Sprint’s future plans for supporting and integrating ground-breaking open technologies like Node.js into their suite of mobile development tools.

“Web and mobile apps need to embrace performance oriented yet efficient architectures, ” said Jason Delker, director of Product Development, Sprint. “By reducing the overhead to support low latency, high concurrency apps –  the next generation of connected mobile applications – developers can create a richer and more engaging user experience without the burden of expensive back-end infrastructure.  Node represents an exciting opportunity for Sprint because the language is easy to learn and the architecture is ideal to serve next-generation connected mobile applications. Our collaboration with Joyent is part of our goal to integrate leading edge technologies both internally at Sprint and externally as part of our toolkit for Sprint app developers.”

Given these benefits, Sprint and Joyent are collaborating over the coming months to offer Node.js developer instances on Joyent’s SmartDataCenter cloud software for the Sprint Developer Community.

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

We went for a number of reasons. First, we were invited. Two of our engineers, Brendan Gregg and Robert Mustacchi, were on the speaker schedule. Second, we have been eagerly working with other members of the illumos community to grow the base of developers building applications and tools for this descendant of OpenSolaris (you probably already know by now that Joyent maintains and uses extensively SmartOS, an illumos distribution). A few people asked what we were doing at a Linux conference but after we explained that illumos / SmartOS are completely open sourced, they were happy to learn more. And we got some great feedback from people who are interested in developing on illumos that will help guide our community building.

Brendan delivered a well-received talk – “Performance Analysis: New Tools and Concepts from The Cloud”. This is a topic we were asked about a lot in the booth – namely, how can I gain real transparency into what’s happening in my cloud architecture and, in particular, in my CPU, file system, I/O and other core functions that remain largely inaccessible in other clouds such as Amazon’s EC2 and Rackspace. Here’s a link to the slides and a description from the program:

Cloud Computing introduces new challenges for performance analysis, for both customers and operators of the cloud. Apart from monitoring a scaling environment, issues within a system can be complicated when tenants are competing for the same resources, and are invisible to each other. Other factors include rapidly changing production code and wildly unpredictable traffic surges. For performance analysis in the Joyent public cloud, we use a variety of tools including Dynamic Tracing, which allows us to create custom tools and metrics and to explore new concepts. I’ll discuss a collection of these tools and the metrics that they measure. While these are DTrace-based, the focus of the talk is on which metrics are proving useful for analyzing real cloud issues.

This is an excellent primer on what’s so cool about DTrace and, by extension, Joyent Cloud Analytics. What do you think? Send us feedback as we’ll be posting more on this topic. And thanks for reading.

In the cloud, we are rapidly moving from providing development environments to running critical applications in production. This shift means application must run seamlessly and predictably well.

So what does it then mean to run applications “predictably well?” And how do we augment and improve running application “well” through time?

Read More »

Photo by Flickr user Creativity103.

A quick note about MongoDB Los Angeles, a conference put on in LA by our partners at 10gen (the initiator, contributor and continual sponsor of  the non-relational open source database MongoDB) on January 19th. Our esteemed CTO, Jason Hoffman, is going to be presenting a talk “N2M: Node.js and MongoDB as the modern stack for the real-time web.” Here’s a quick synopsis:

The combination of node.js and mongodb has emerged as the framework of choice for people building real-time applications, and is on the path to becoming the replacement for the common LAMP stack. This talk will suggest some reasons why and discuss some of the observed patterns in these types of applications.

Joyent Cloud General Manager Steve Tuck will be down there manning the booth and can answer any technology questions you might have. The MongoDB Los Angeles event has proven so popular that 10gen had to lift the previous attendance limit to add capacity.

We work closely with 10gen to deliver MongoDB functionality to Joyent Cloud users — most recently on the SmartOS SmartMachine Appliance for MongoDB that we unveiled last month at the MongoDB Silicon Valley conference. What we heard at that show – and look forward to talking about more in Los Angeles — is that companies are testing out and deploying a Node.js plus MongoDB application stack for highly dynamic applications that need to run fast.

And that’s partly what Jason will be talking about. If you want to sign up for the show, you can get a 25% discount off list price by using “Joyent_MongoLA” as the the discount code. Have questions about running a MongoDB app on the Joyent Cloud? Come see us in Los Angeles!