Joyent Partners with Canonical on Customized Ubuntu as a Cloud Service
Joyent, well-known on the cloud computing scene and a growing player in Big Data analytics, announced a partnership with Canonical today to provide customers with optimized and supported Ubuntu server images in the Joyent Cloud. Effectively, users will be able to leverage a Canonical-customized Ubuntu in the cloud. The two companies also want to enable developers and enterprises to create mobile, big data and high-performance applications on Ubuntu and Joyent's OS-Virtualized cloud platform.
"As companies, Joyent and Canonical share core values: we both embrace community and open source technologies, and we both believe in delivering to users a high-performance experience that is tailored to their unique needs,"said Joyent SVP of Engineering Bryan Cantrill, in a statement. "Running certified Ubuntu images from Canonical as hardware-virtualized guests on SmartOS in the Joyent cloud means customers will have access to best-of-breed features coupled with exceptional support."
Joyent's cloud platform is known for its flexible orchestration and management suite. Canonical has been working to enhance Ubuntu to work efficiently with Joyent Cloud, including delivering an advanced security and authentication model and providing tools for faster initialization and configuration of cloud images. For customers that also want to ensure that they have options for enterprise or mission critical support, Joyent will provide Canonical-backed Enhanced Support options for Ubuntu.
Joyent is also known to many as the corporate steward of the open source Node.js project. Node.js is focused on enabling scalable, event-driven network applications. Working with Canonical, Joyent will also now be responsible for managing, updating, and maintaining a Node.js charm. Charms are an encapsulation of all information needed to deploy and configure cloud services. Charms are used by Juju, Canonical’s open source cloud orchestration tool, which makes it easy to design, deploy, manage and scale workloads and software environments to the cloud.
“The performance and features of Joyent Cloud makes it an attractive proposition for Ubuntu users, who value reliability, speed and agility,” said Jane Silber, CEO at Canonical. ”We have worked hard to ensure the best possible experience with Ubuntu on Joyent Cloud and improve the quality and performance of Node.js charms for building scale-out applications.”
Much has been made of Canonical's increasing focus on OpenStack, and the company has even tied Ubuntu's development cycles to OpenStack's but today's news illustrates that Canonical sees the competitive cloud computing landscape for what it is. Canonical can quickly gain synergies with Joyent's current cloud clients. For more information on the partnership visit http://www.joyent.com.