Selecting a Cloud Service: 5 Questions to Ask Prospective Providers
For most companies of a certain size it almost always makes more economic sense for them to own their own IT infrastructure. For organizations such as Samsung that are trying to build a massive application ecosystem around a wide variety of devices, it’s almost essential.
Samsung this week revealed it is acquiring Joyent, a provider of public cloud services based on a SmartOS implantation of Unix that is made available with the context of a Joyent microservices architecture.
Jacopo Lenzi, senior vice president, Business Development and M&A at Samsung Electronics Global Innovation Center, says Joyent will continue to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung. In the months ahead, Samsung will increasingly become an anchor tenant on the Joyent cloud. Lenzi says Samsung will continue to use other public clouds, but the intention is to make Joyent a primary destination for applications developed by Samsung and its partners.
In effect, Joyent CEO Scott Hammond says, Samsung will become the “anchor tenant” that Joyent needs to be able to operate a public cloud at a level of economic efficiency that enables it to compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
As an early pioneer in the usage of containers, Joyent has always enjoyed the benefits of an efficient approach to maximizing IT infrastructure utilization on its cloud. The missing piece has always been the volume of applications running on its cloud. With the aid of Samsung, that issue should be off the table.
Of course, Joyent is perhaps best known for its leadership in the development of Node.js, the most widely used instance of JavaScript. Hammond says it’s too early to determine whether there are any synergies to be developed between the Node.js and Samsung communities. But at some point down the road, those synergies will surely be explored.
