After years of touting its cloud computing tech, Joyent open sources it

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Cloud computing provider Joyent has long been respected for its technological chops, but has struggled to find an identity among a sea of cloud providers and technologies with much larger operations and much larger marketing budgets. Now, the tides might finally be shifting in Joyent’s direction — and it’s doing everything it can to ride them.

Last week, it was the announcement of a $15 million investment and a repositioning of itself as an infrastructure platform that’s all about containers. The company has actually been touting its container approach for years, but the fast rise of technologies such as Docker, CoreOS and Google’s Kubernetes container-management system has put containers at the top of a lot of minds. On Thursday, Joyent took an even bigger step by open sourcing the code that powers its cloud computing and object storage systems, respectively called SmartDataCenter and Manta…

Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill announced the decision in a blog post, explaining what’s available in some detail. Notably, the systems’ GitHub repositories are actually meta-repositories that also include all the components that support them. “For example,” Cantrill wrote, “Manatee is a ZooKeeper-based system that manages Postgres replication and automates failover; Moray is a key-value service that lives on top of Postgres. Taken together, Manatee and Moray implement a highly-available key-value service that we use as the foundation for many other components in SDC and Manta — and one that we think others will find useful as well.”…

Read more from the source @ https://gigaom.com/2014/11/07/after-years-of-touting-its-cloud-computing-tech-joyent-open-sources-it/