I hadn’t been on the cable cars in more than 20 years, but the California Street line happened to be my most efficient route between two points yesterday. So I learned that you’re allowed to hang off the side, as long as you stand on the runner board and don’t block people getting on and off. Makes for a hair-raising view, but – whee!
Fine with That
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New Videos: The Gregg Performance Series
Working for Joyent, I continue to create lots of technical video (~32 hours of edited material to date). Most recent examples, here, are the start of a series I’m doing with Brendan Gregg (author of the DTrace book). In the course of his research to make these videos, Brendan even made some surprising discoveries about tools that everyone thought they knew all about.
Above: Brendan Gregg discusses vmstat, a performance tool used in Solaris-based operating systems, including Solaris 10, SmartOS, IllumOS, that shows the health of the entire system. Part 2 covers all the fields in detail. Part 3 talks about how vmstat works in Joyent’s SmartOS.
^ Brendan talks about the 1, 5 and 15 minute load averages as reported by tools such as uptime and prstat, and then explains in details how they work on Solaris-based Operating Systems including SmartOS, and reveals why they aren’t really 1, 5 and 15 minute averages.
Below: Brendan discusses the key fields of mpstat, another performance tool used in Solaris-based operating systems, including Solaris 10, SmartOS, Illumos, to shows the health of the CPUs on multi-processor systems. Part 2 covers all the fields in detail. Part 3 is a deeper dive into the fields using other tools.
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illumos in the Cloud: What is Joyent Up to?
For years – decades, even – Sun Microsystems held some of the world’s greatest engineering talent fast in its cozy embrace. Then, as so often happens, acquisition unleashed a storm of change. A year later, a good deal of Sun’s top talent has moved on, including some well-known names from Solaris engineering. I’m sure this tech diaspora will benefit the industry as a whole, as Sun talent spreads far and wide.
For three years at Sun, I worked closely with top Solaris engineers. Many became friends, so I have kept in touch with those who left, and kept an eye on where they went. A number of the best and brightest settled at a cloud computing company out of San Francisco, called Joyent.
Bryan Cantrill, Jerry Jelinek, Brendan Gregg (with whom I worked very closely on the DTrace book), and several other members of Sun’s FISHworks team made the move to Joyent in late 2010. In addition, Joyent had brought on Ryan Dahl (the creator of Node.js, a hot new technology the world was beginning to hear about), Isaac Schlueter and more recently, Tom Hughes-Croucher (author of the upcoming Node.js book for O’Reilly). Putting all these elements together, it was clear that Joyent must be up to something very interesting; I had to become a Joyeur myself to find out exactly what was going on in the company!
We should first spend a few words to answer the question: What exactly is cloud computing? As Steve Gillmor said when asked at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference in 2008: to developers, cloud computing means being able to implement ideas at a very early stage, without having to concern themselves about future scaling up. This applies to start-ups and enterprises as well – companies too want a place to implement and deploy their applications or games quickly and flexibly with confidence they can scale rapidly if needed.
A good cloud hosting company provides the just-right amount of computing infrastructure, exactly when you need it. This includes “bursting” CPU capacity, so that your Facebook game doesn’t fall over when it suddenly goes viral, making you a victim of your own success. A good cloud hosting company has monitoring tools that can tell the difference between a short-term surge in traffic and a longer-term need to scale up capacity. Launched in early 2004 as one of the early pioneers of cloud computing, Joyent was the platform of choice for many popular web startups, including Twitter, WordPress and more. Over time, Joyent’s public cloud service became hugely popular with casual/social game studios, retail and ecommerce companies and many social networking applications. While the public face of Joyent has been a cloud computing service much like Amazon’s (but a lot faster), at heart Joyent is a software company.
I was already familiar with Joyent as one of the most innovative users of OpenSolaris: Ben Rockwood was a frequent conference speaker on OpenSolaris and related topics, and was active in the OpenSolaris community. Joyent was also one of the biggest contributors to OpenSolaris patches and is now a supporter of Illumos.
Based on Illumos, Joyent has created its own operating system, SmartOS, optimized for cloud computing. Why make a cloud kernel based on Illumos? From the cloud operator’s perspective, the advantages are obvious:
Maximize resource usage
- Illumos virtualization (zones and Crossbow network virtualization) lets a cloud hosting provider put more customers on the physical server (each in their own SmartMachine), while still giving all of them phenomenal performance. Joyent’s servers typically run at 70% CPU capacity, against an industry standard of around 30%.
- Creation and startup of additional zones – in other words, adding new paying customers – is nearly instantaneous.
- 100% of RAM is allocated to SmartMachines or repurposed for SmartCache as an ARC-cache layer between application and disk.
Maximize performance
- No hardware emulation means the machine runs much faster; SmartOS is the hypervisor.
- In cloud computing, latency is everything. ZFS with ARC dramatically improves disk performance, reducing a major source of slowdowns.
- 3X more transactions per second compared to Amazon EC2 of similar size and cost.
Know what’s going on
- Users of Solaris, Illumos, Mac OS X and FreeBSD know that DTrace gives you an unprecedented view throughout the software stack. But all that power comes at a price: using DTrace effectively requires expertise. The Joyent team is now harnessing the power of DTrace in a more user-friendly form with cloud analytics, which will be available to Joyent customers via a GUI and an API.
Companies who want to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud – variable costs, flexible resource usage, and affordability – are choosing Joyent for the efficiency it offers compared to legacy cloud systems. Thank you, Illumos, for giving us much better utilization and faster performance, and hence lower costs to customers.
The power of SmartOS is now available to another kind of Joyent customer: the Service Providers (telcos, ISPs, datacenter operators) who are using Joyent’s cloud software to deliver cloud services to their customers. With the cloud market expected to grow from 30-55% in coming years, it’s no wonder that so many existing providers want to get into the cloud business too. And Joyent is making this very, very easy to do.
Led by VP of Engineering Bryan Cantrill, Joyent’s very talented engineering team has rolled up years of cloud computing experience into a powerful yet easy to use software package, SmartDataCenter 6. This is the fruit of a major engineering effort around multi-tenancy operation in the cloud, including enhancements to OS-level virtualization, DTrace and ZFS. These technologies – powerful and revolutionary as they are – are only the foundation of a cloud operating system. Using Node.js – a Joyent framework for high-throughput, evented-oriented systems – Joyent has built orchestration and management software that turns these foundational OS technologies into a revolutionary cloud offering.
I’m excited to be here at Joyent, working with amazing people on wonderful things. If you’re a current Joyent customer, or a prospect interested in learning more, please drop me a line or go to Joyent.com or JoyentCloud.com to learn more. I’mDeirdre@joyent.com.
originally published in Sun System News
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The (Previous) Bombing of Tripoli
Reading the news today that US forces are bombing Tripoli brought on a quirky memory, almost completely unrelated to today’s events.
Last time the US bombed Tripoli, in 1986, I was on a study abroad year in Benares, India. I had chosen to live in Vijayanagaram Bhavan, the headquarters of the College Year in India program, so knew about all the students’ comings and goings. I also kept an eye on what was going in the world (a habit picked up from my dad the newshound). I owned a shortwave radio, and used it to listen to the Voice of America, BBC World Service, and Radio Moscow (whose announcers all sounded as if they had been raised in Nebraska).
I wrote up daily news summaries and posted them on the center’s bulletin board for my fellow students, a service they seemed to appreciate. So it was I who informed them about the US attack, which was not well received by the world community, nor by many Americans. There were fears of retaliatory attacks on American citizens worldwide. I heaved a sigh and got on with my life – been there, been threatened with death by the Islamic Jihad. We also imagined, I don’t know how realistically, the possibility of full-scale war, complete with Vietnam-style conscription of US youth.
A few days later, an American showed up at the Bhavan with a list of student names he wanted to check. His wife was a consular officer with the US Embassy in Delhi, so it was her duty to keep track of US citizens in the region in case there should be a need to whisk us all to safety. I was pleased that, having put my life in danger, my government was at least proposing to get me out of it again, and was happy to give the man the information he needed. Meanwhile, my classmates were at the other end of the verandah, muttering among themselves about the stranger and what his business might be.
As the man and I were finishing, one of the students – J, a painfully politically correct young man – came bustling up.
“Sir,” he said officiously, “I would like to lodge a complaint about the actions of the US government in Libya – ” He didn’t get to finish.
The man looked him straight in the eye and barked: “I am here to inform you that all US males over the age of 18 are being drafted into the army, and you have two days to report to the nearest recruiting center!”
J’s jaw dropped, he turned white as a sheet, and for once had nothing to say.
“Just kidding.”
The man smiled sweetly, and went about his business.
