Last night Mark Mayo hosted the first Joyent meetup in Vancouver.

I've been following the Joyent adventures for quite some time. They're a small company, but they're aiming high. A while back, they merged with TextDrive, and became a vertically integrated hosting + applications/product company (and even open-sourced their Rails-based Connector suite -- see you at OSCMS next year!). In many ways, this is what Bryght's partnership with WorkHabit has been about: if we hadn't found such great partners, we would have had to build their expertise as part of our own company. Application hosting is still something that isn't that well understood, and the commodity-shared-hosting-optimized-for-Dreamweaver is in for a rude awakening one of these days.

I got a chance to talk a bunch of virtualization smack with Mark Mayo. Joyent is, as Mark puts it, "focusing on operating system level virtualization". They have had much publicized usage of hardware and software, and are now firmly in a Solaris camp. I think this is great: being specialized is a good thing, and it will sync you up nicely with a certain segment of customers.

On the rest of the virtualization landscape, we mumbled a few things about 3Tera's platform, which Bryght and WorkHabit evaluated and eventually rejected*. But, apparently we can't say any more, because their lawyers are very good. Yes, that's cryptic: searching for locked threads in various hosting forums that have been closed by order of cease-and-desist doesn't leave a good taste in your mouth.

Over in Europe, there is QLayer, looking to virtualize entire datacenters. Interesting stuff, doesn't seem to be well known over here at all.

Similarly, with WorkHabit, we're working towards eventually having more complex offerings, so you could get a load balancer, 2+ front end web servers, and a database cluster, all implemented as virtual instances. We'll continue to specialize in production Drupal hosting, although this same setup is appropriate for most LAMP stack based applications. Joyent is known for production Rails hosting, first and foremost. Mark shared that approximately 90% of the customers on their Accelerator service are Rails and Java, with only about 10% being PHP / Python / etc. Hmm...I smell a cross promotion opportunity here :P

One final side note was a discussion on making virtual images available. Lullabot has had an excellent series of posts on setting up various aspects of a local development environment, but if your local environment differs (PHP version, OS and library version, etc.) from your production environment, it can be tricky to track down where bugs or differences are coming from. The solution we've been looking at is to make the CentOS-based Xen images that we use for production hosting available as downloadable Parallels, VMWare, or for that matter native Xen images. Then, you can run a local development environment that is identical to production. With Joyent's OpenSolaris stack, this makes even more sense, and Mark did say they are working through some licensing issues to see if they can make such a distribution.

Thanks, Joyent (and in particular local Mark Mayo), for having this meetup, and welcome to the continued growth of interesting stuff happening in the Vancouver tech community.

*Update: Vlad from 3Tera points out that their stuff doesn't run MediaTemple. I must have been thinking of TheGridLayer. My apologies.