Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Standing up SmartDataCenter
Over the past year, we at Joyent have been weaving some threads that may have at times seemed disconnected: last fall, we developed a prototype of DTrace-based cloud instrumentation as part of hosting the first Node Knockout competition; in the spring, we launched our no.de service with full-fledged real-time cloud analytics; and several weeks ago, [...]
KVM on illumos
A little over a year ago, I came to Joyent because of a shared belief that systems software innovation matters — that there is no level of the software stack that should be considered off-limits to innovation. Specifically, we ardently believe in innovating in the operating system itself — that extending and leveraging technologies like [...]
In defense of intrapreneurialism
Trevor pointed me to a ChubbyBrain article that derided “intrapreneurs” as having nothing in common with their entrepreneurial brethren. While I don’t necessary love the term, what we did at Fishworks is probably most accurately described as “intrapreneurial” — and based on both our experiences there and the caustic tone of the Chubby polemic, I [...]
When magic collides
We had an interesting issue come up the other day, one that ended up being a pretty nasty bug in DTrace. It merits a detailed explanation, but first, a cautionary note: we’re headed into rough country; in the immortal words of Sixth Edition, you are not expected to understand this. The problem we noticed was [...]
Log/linear quantizations in DTrace
As I alluded to when I first joined Joyent, we are using DTrace as a foundation to tackle the cloud observability problem. And as you may have seen, we’re making some serious headway on this problem. Among the gritty details of scalably instrumenting latency is a dirty little problem around data aggregation: when we instrument [...]
The DIRT on JSConf.eu and Surge
I just got back from an exciting (if exhausting) conference double-header: JSConf.eu and Surge. These conferences made for an interesting pairing, together encompassing much of the enthusiasm and challenges in today’s systems. It started in Berlin with JSConf.eu, a conference that reflects both JavaScript’s energy and diversity. Ryan introduced Node.js to the world at JSConf.eu [...]
A physician’s son
My father is an emergency medical physician, a fact that has had a subtle but discernable influence on my career as a software engineer. Emergency medicine and software engineering are of course very different problems, and even though there are times when a major and cascading software systems failure can make a datacenter feel like [...]
DTrace, node.js and the Robinson Projection
When I joined Joyent, I mentioned that I was seeking to apply DTrace to the cloud, and that I was particularly excited about the development of node.js — leaving it implict that the intersection of the two technologies would be naturally interesting, As it turns out, we have had an early opportunity to show the [...]
The liberation of OpenSolaris
As many have seen, Oracle has elected to stop contributing to OpenSolaris. This decision is, to put it bluntly, stupid. Indeed, I would (and did) liken it to L. Paul Bremer‘s decision to disband the Iraqi military after the fall of Saddam Hussein: beyond merely a foolish decision borne out of a distorted worldview, it [...]
The node.js demographic
I went to the node.js meetup last night in Palo Alto, and it was an interesting affair on several levels. First (and least surprisingly), it was packed, with the Sencha folks joking that they would need to move to a bigger space just to be able to host the event. Second, the technical content itself [...]