Joyent Makes Open Source Private Cloud Container Platform Available

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Many internal IT organizations that are building private clouds today are trying to borrow structural IT concepts pioneered by public cloud service providers. As a provider of one of those services, Joyent today announced it will make it easier for internal IT organizations to do just that by making the container orchestration and object storage software it developed available under an open source Mozilla Public 2.0 license.

Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill says the company’s SmartDataCenter container orchestration software and Manta object storage software that is based on ZFS are at the heart of the company’s public cloud service. Cantrill says Joyent is moving to make that software available as open source software to make it easier for IT organizations to build hybrid clouds spanning their own private clouds and the Joyent public cloud. In fact, among public cloud service providers, Cantrill says that neither Amazon Web Services (AWS) nor Google have any interest in helping IT organizations build private clouds that run on premise.

Fresh off of picking up $15 million in additional financing, Joyent is a major proponent of using containers to build clouds as a lighterweight alternative to virtual machine. With the rise of Docker as a cross-platform implementation of a container, Joyent is now moving to support Docker containers alongside the Linux containers it previously provided to customers.

Cantrill notes that subcomponents of SmartDataCenter and Manta, written primarily in Node.js,  are also likely to be incorporated in a wide variety of scenarios. Manatee, for example, is a ZooKeeper-based system that manages Postgres database replication and automates failover. Moray is a key-value service that lives on top of Postgres. Taken together, Manatee and Moray make Postgres much more resilient.

SmartDataCenter and Manta join Node.js and SmartOs as major open source contributions that have been primarily driven by Joyent. It remains to be seen how widely adopted SmartDataCenter and Manta will become. But open source options for building private clouds directly translate into more flexibility for internal IT organizations that are still weighing private cloud options based on virtual machines rather than containers that may ultimately prove to be much easier to provision and manage.