Comments on: Joyent Buys Reasonably Smart to Create Open-source Cloud

By: How Much Money Did Joyent Really Raise?

How Much Money Did Joyent Really Raise? — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:01:27 +0000

[...] Joyent, the six year old Sausalito, Calif.-based start-up that started out as a web hosting company but eventually evolved into a cloud service provide. Neither Intel, nor Joyent disclosed the amount of money invested, but [...]

By: Consuming compute and storage services | Digital Asset Management

Consuming compute and storage services | Digital Asset Management — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 07:25:34 +0000

[...] Joyent Buys Reasonably Smart to Create Open-source Cloud (gigaom.com) [...]

By: Boycott Novell » Links 15/01/2009: GNU/Linux Tops Windows, OS X

Boycott Novell » Links 15/01/2009: GNU/Linux Tops Windows, OS X — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:47:22 +0000

[...] Joyent Buys Reasonably Smart to Create Open-source Cloud Joyent today announced it has agreed to acquire Reasonably Smart, a fledgling cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git, for an undisclosed amount. While on the surface it might look like simple industry consolidation, Reasonably Smart’s technology will in fact help Joyent compete with emerging service-centric clouds while retaining an open model that makes developers comfortable. [...]

By: Geir Magnusson Jr

Geir Magnusson Jr — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:15:59 +0000

Alistair :

Ok - it's just that the way the articled flowed :

".... Users aren't locked in. .... " " ... By contrast, ... 10gen ..."

positioned 10gen as a system where users were locked in to a provider, like with Azure and Google.

I just wanted to make it clear that anyone can take the open source 10gen stack and run it where they choose, even on Joyent :)

geir

By: Joyent Buys Reasonably Smart, Focusing on the Open Source Cloud | google android os blog

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:42:59 +0000

[...] Smart, a fledgling open cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git, for an undisclosed amount, reports GigaOm. "While on the surface it might look like simple industry consolidation, Reasonably Smart’s [...]

By: Alistair Croll

Alistair Croll — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:35:43 +0000

@Geir: 10Gen's model of open source platforms (Mongo) that scale without caring about infrastructure is directly parallel to Reasonably Smart's model (JavaScript + Git + other I/O, now open source). That was my point -- Joyent needed a scalable development environment that people could run on their own if they chose.

@anon: The Reasonably Smart platform runs on your desktop if you want it to, with I/O extensions that you can use and tweak.

@Andy: Things like Hypertable (Bigtable-like) and CouchDB (SimpleDB-like) aim to reduce the lock-in but aren't plug-compatible with Google or Amazon today. As for the JavaScript thing, yeah, I thought that too. James A. Duncan, ReasonablySmart's CTO, tells a good story around that though. I suspect that for simple data-driven front-ends, it's relatively easy. Who knows, maybe all those client-side coders will use it...

Hopefully there will be some standardization on a minimum feature set soon. But the cloud operators know that if they make it completely transparent to move your app from one cloud to another, they'll commoditize themselves. So they need to put in value-added services to keep you there. Which means that while you might one day be able to move your Google App Engine app from Bigtable to your own Hypertable, you're unlikely to be able to disconnect from Google Checkout, or Search, or mapping.

It's those services that will be lock-in in the long term, just as it was things like font managers, printer drivers, and RTF editors on Windows that kept developers using it. It's just too much of a pain to go rebuild it from scratch.

By: Geir Magnusson Jr

Geir Magnusson Jr — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:54:57 +0000

All of 10gen's software is open source as well, so you can take it run on your own equipment, on AWS, at Rackspace, wherever you wish.

I'm not sure how our model is seen as any different than that of Joyent/RS.

geir VP, Engineering 10gen

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:40:16 +0000

The concept of Reasonably Smart sounds good.

But why on earth did you have to pick javascript?? The reality is, NO ONE write server apps in javascript. By choosing js, you immediately cut your potential user base by 99.99%.

Also, how is this any less lock-in than Google App Engine? GAE uses its own proprietary data store. Reasonably Smart also uses its own proprietary data store.

At least GAE uses Python, which makes infinitely more sense than javascript for server programming.

By: gp

gp — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:07:57 +0000

write code in javascript ……..OMG!!

By: Rajesh

Rajesh — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:20:43 +0000

Hey painstaking research, there.

Rajesh

By: Rod Boothby

Rod Boothby — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 06:25:39 +0000

The source code for Reasonably Smart is open source. Joyent will be running a Reasonably Smart Platform service, but if you don’t like ours, you can down load the code and run your own version of the Reasonably Smart Platform, just like you can run your own instance of MySQL, Apache, Nginx, TomCat, Thin, or Mongrel.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 05:23:17 +0000

I dont understand how Reasonably Smart is open and not a vendor lock in. Since you have to write server side code in Javascript with their proprietary libraries for database etc, you would end up locked in to Reasonably Smart. There is no other open source platform that allows to write code in Javascript (except appjet).