As part of the opening of our new Amsterdam data center, we sponsored The Next Web 2012, a really killer conference. So we did a bit of the corporate thing, sponsoring the networking lounge. But definitely the highlight of our trip was the Kings of Code Hack Battle. The TNW team ran the event and there were some amazing entrants. For the first through third place teams we offered a total of $9,000 in Joyent Cloud compute credits. And it was worth every penny, as the winners totally blew us away! Here’s the list:

1st Place – Covify. They created an amazing application that allows you to scan your CD covers and play them in Spotify. You can read more about their hack here http://hackbattle.thenextweb.com/index.php/Covify, or see them pitch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQwfwl9dWsg&feature=plcp (as a bonus, an interview after they’ve just won http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJvtQYgwNxw&feature=plcp).

2nd Place – VersionBox. This is version control for Dropbox. You can read more about their hack here http://hackbattle.thenextweb.com/index.php/VersionBox, and see them pitch here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsZVoL9pRNk&feature=plcp. These guys stayed overnight, hacking away until the very next day. A well deserved second place and bonus points for using Node.js to power their app.

3rd Place – Electric Vampires. This is a gamified home energy savings app. You can read more here http://hackbattle.thenextweb.com/index.php/Electric_Vampires and see their pitch here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jSq9IWvshU&feature=plcp). The name is a play on the term “Vampire” appliances – sleeping or dormant appliances which remain moderately active and suck up $3 billion worth of electricity in the U.S. alone.

We also want to thank our fellow sponsors and partners for the Hack Battle. Facebook, KPN, Twilio, MailChimp, SendGrid, SkyDrive, Dropbox, Rijksmuseum, Tendril and Spotify. Free beer and pizza’s are provided by .me. A most excellent event all around. And congrats to all participants in the Hack Battle. We hope you all had a good time (and we gave you all $100 credits towards Joyent Cloud). See you all at the next event.

Just in case you missed our tweets and our press release (who reads them anymore?), here’s the scoop on Joyent Cloud Europe. We just lit up our first data center outside North America and its in Amsterdam! This is a Tier-4 facility with all the goodies you’ve come to expect from Joyent Cloud: all Nehalem / Westmere processors and 15k RPM HDs, all 10/40Gbps mesh network, and all the wonderful SmartOS traits (DTrace, Zones, ARC Cache, ZFS). Best of all, you can provision and manage virtual machines from the same unified customer portal or via our Joyent Cloud API.

We moved into Amsterdam in response to customer requests that we get them even closer to end users in the EMEA region. Since we are focused on helping customers deliver Real-Time Web apps in the cloud full production, any extra millisecond edge we can provide is critical. As we’ve previously announced, we’ll be expanding into Asia in the coming months for the same reasons. Customers or developers wishing to test or deploy apps with multi-DC architectures, fail-over strategies, and the like can easily do so. Pricing remains constant across all Joyent Cloud DCs and you get all the other price benefits such as the best user density per VM in the cloud, 20 TBs per month of free bandwidth (very nice if you are used to pushing data back and forth between zones), and 400% CPU bursting in real-time – at no extra charge – to get you over the hump when that big traffic spike hits.

Got questions? Ping our sales guys or our solutions architects. Many of our PaaS and SaaS partners will shortly be setting up shop in Amsterdam so very soon you can expect to, say, deploy a Nodejitsu or Cloudant or Firebase app in multiple Joyent Cloud DCs! Thanks for reading and feedback, as always, is welcome.

^

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. (Image courtesy of Brendan Gregg / DTrace.org).

MONGODB + JOYENT CLOUD: THE MONGO/NODE.JS STACK WITH 10GEN AND MONGOLAB ON FEBRUARY 29 AT 6:00 PM

Join this Joyent Cloud User Group (JCUG) Meetup focused on Node.js and MongoDB. 10gen Director of Product Marketing Jared Rosoff and MongoLab CTO Todd Dampier will give presentations on building / scaling MongoDB + Node.js apps in Joyent Cloud and running a MongoDB-as-a-Service product on Joyent SmartOS and Joyent Cloud. Sign up here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2971069549

MONITORING PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURES ON SMARTOS: GOING NATIVE WITH CIRCONUS ON MARCH 7 AT 6:15 PM

Join us for a presentation from Brian Clapper, CTO of Circonus. Brian will discuss what types of unique SmartOS telemetry are supported in Circonus and how to approach instrumenting SmartOS. He will also provide a DevOps perspective on monitoring SmartOS-based experiences gleaned from work in performance optimization and high-scalability application development and monitoring at Circonus. Sign up here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2972680367

MAKING QUIZLET RUN REALLY FAST: RAPID ROOT-CAUSE ANALYSIS WITH MONITORING AND ANALYTICS TOOLS ON MARCH 14 AT 6:30 PM

Join us for a presentation from Andrew Sutherland, the Founder and CTO of Quizlet. Andrew will discuss how Quizlet uses New Relic, Joyent Cloud Analytics and DTrace in combination to monitor web applications and then quickly identify the source performance issues that arise, ranging from lower-level process problems to specific bugs in higher-level dynamic code environments. Sign up here:http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3028025907

You can also join our Joyent Cloud User Group, a freshly minted Meetup group where we’ll be moving all community activities going forward.

Summary Greetings and happy Friday! We’re expanding eastwards with a new data center in the Mid-Atlantic. It’s live with customers and available for either API-based or portal-driven new provisioning of virtual compute resources.

Details: Folks provisioning machines on Joyent Cloud last week may have noticed a new option in their data center pulldown selector. That would be our newest East Coast data center facility located in the Ashburn, VA area which we lit up last Thursday. It’s now running live with active customers, joining our Southwest and West data centers running the latest version of our SmartDataCenter software. This is just the first of several new locations coming online in 2012 to ensure companies everywhere have access to the true Real-Time Cloud, which is purpose-built for running applications that require true real-time performance and low latency like walkie-talk app Voxer, LinkedIn mobile, and eCommerce company Gilt Groupe.

Our commitment to running on the very best hardware has not changed and you will deploy on top of premium servers running Nehalem/Westmere chipsets with full 10 gigabit connectivity and 15k spindles in our HDDs. We used the best servers and the fastest drives because we know that bare metal is a key determinant in end user experience, even if its through a cloud layer. The new East center packs blazing fast connectivity and peering to all the major ISPs and fiber networks with drops in the Mid-Atlantic Region.

With the new data center, Joyent Cloud users can get even closer to their customers on the East Coast, in EMEA, and in South America. This also gives users far more flexibility when it comes to spreading their infrastructure risk or putting in place high-performance DNS and geographically redundant load-balancing, among other measures. We will be expanding our geographical footprint aggressively in the coming months – both with our own new regions in Europe and Asia and through partners like Telefonica, standing up public cloud services running Joyent’s SmartDataCenter software later this year. In short, the Real-Time Cloud is going to get even more so – and in a hurry. Thanks for reading. And if you have deployed in our East facility, let us know what you think.

One thing our customers have been asking for is technology to make it easier for them to scale and incorporate existing popular cloud orchestration and management tools. First we released our Cloud API to enable instantiation and management of cloud services from outside our portal. Next, Joyeur Kevin Chan built out a fog.io pull that made it even easier for developers and operations teams to manage cloud resources on Joyent Cloud (it’s pending merge into the fog libraries but likely to happy very soon). Today we are announcing a partnership with enStratus. They provide a cloud management and automation platform that makes it much easier to manage and quickly scale complex cloud deployments. Here’s what enStratus delivers to Joyent Cloud users:

• Key Management and Encryption – the enStratus patent-pending security architecture holds all cloud credentials outside the cloud provider with automated encryption
• Access Controls – Granular, fully customizable role-based security provides the right level of control for development, QA, business or partner teams
• Automation – Automate the scaling of cloud infrastructure to meet demand and match service level requirements, using standard configuration management tools, such as Chef and Puppet
• Financial Controls – Track and manage costs by customer or project by assigning billing codes with hard and soft spending caps
• API – The enStratus API allows operations teams to extend, integrate or customize enStratus for specific requirements

Also, enStratus makes it drop-dead simple to manage Joyent Cloud compute resources as part of multi-cloud deployments, or, by using Chef and Puppet, two IT configuration management tools that we know many of you use and love. The enStratus API makes all of this quite elementary. Because enStratus is a platform designed for multi-cloud deployments, organizations that want to diversify their cloud utilization onto Joyent Cloud can now do so with the click of a button.

You can read up on our Wiki documentation on this new offering here. And stay tuned for an announcement of a Webinar and a subsequent Meetup that will give you a solid technical introduction covering how to deploy enStratus on the Joyent Cloud. Lastly, let us know what you think of enStratus and Joyent Cloud. We’d love your feedback. Thanks for reading.

We’ll see you next week in the pop-up city-within-a-city that is called Mobile World Congress, set for next Monday, February 27 to Thursday, March 1 in Barcelona.

A global team of Joyent executives, including CEO David Young, CTO Jason Hoffman, Joyent Cloud General Manager Steve Tuck and President of Europe Philippe Weppe, will be present to meet with partners and prospects about how Joyent’s unique technologies combine to assist operators and enterprises with their real-time cloud requirements:

• The best way to set up and deploy a real-time cloud for developing and deploying mobile apps
• What it takes to support a real-time machine-to-machine compute cloud
• How service providers can augment revenue and profit with a powerful public cloud
• What enterprises should consider as they design their private clouds
• How to become one of a very few select alliance partners in the seamlessly connected high performance public clouds that will roll out globally over the coming year

Joyent will be in the Cloud Pavilion in Hall 2 on the first floor (which translates to second floor in the U.S.). Our booth number is 2.1A75. Here’s a map of the entire, enormous operation.

Let us know if you’d like to meet by sending an email to info@joyent.com or contacting us via Twitter – @Joyent - and we’ll respond promptly.