Joyent Open Sources its Central Cloud and Container Tools

While the OpenStack Summit in Paris has generated a lot of news this week, cloud-focused company Joyent has announced that it is open sourcing its core technology. Joyent's platform can compete with OpenStack and other cloud offerings, and facilitates efficienet use of container technologies like Docker.

Joyent has been an IaaS/PaaS cloud player worth watching, and we've covered the company several times. Specifically, the company has now open sourced its core products SmartDataCenter and the Manta object storage platform.

SmartDataCenter is container-based orchestration software that is used to run the Joyent public cloud. Joyent has used it for years to run on-the-metal OS containers, securely and at scale. Manta is the company's multi-tenant ZFS-based object storage platform that allows OS containers to be spun up directly upon objects,  "effecting arbitrary computation at scale without data movement," according to the company.

A Joyent post notes:

"The unifying technological foundation beneath both SmartDataCenter and Manta is OS-based virtualization, a technology that Joyent pioneered in the cloud way back in 2006. We have long known the transformative power of OS containers, so it has been both exciting and validating for us to see the rise of Docker and the broadening of appreciation for OS-based virtualization. SmartDataCenter and Manta show that containers aren’t merely a fad or developer plaything but rather a fundamental technological advance that represents the foundation for the next generation of computing — and we believe that open sourcing them advances the adoption of container-based architectures more broadly."

"These are sophisticated systems with many moving parts, and you’ll see that these two repositories are in fact meta-repositories that explain the design of each of the systems and then point to the (many) components that comprise them (all now open source, natch). We believe that some of these subcomponents will likely find use entirely outside of SDC and Manta. For example, Manatee is a ZooKeeper-based system that manages Postgres replication and automates failover; Moray is a key-value service that lives on top of Postgres. Taken together, Manatee and Moray implement a highly-available key-value service that we use as the foundation for many other components in SDC and Manta — and one that we think others will find useful as well."

You can get the source for SmartDataCenter and the source for Manta now.

As Simon Phipps notes on InfoWorld:  "Under new management and with $15 million of new funding, Joyent is stepping up to the next level of open source in its business model...Joyent's move could prove both disruptive and influential in the fast-growing but still-nascent market for clouds of containers."

Indeed, it will be very interesting to see what comes of Joyent's new open source directions.