
Amazon ECS vs. Joyent Triton - bcantrill
http://stackshare.io/convox/amazon-ecs-vs-joyent-triton
======
doublerebel
This was exactly my experience when creating the architecture for my last
startup. Joyent's GUI, instance management, and fast helpful support were
invaluable and kept their promise of 100% uptime over a 9 month period (unlike
AWS, Heroku, and Linode who all gave us downtime during that same period).

The security features of SmartOS can not be understated. Managing an AWS stack
seems archaic in comparison, but AWS does seem cheap and more flexible at
first glance. I think it's too easy these days to overcomplicate a stack with
AWS and/or Docker, and Joyent has picked the right pain points to streamline.
I'm using Joyent in my new ventures without hesitation.

~~~
nzoschke
Author of the post here.

Nice to hear more Joyent success stories!

How do you handle load balancing?

------
BraveNewCurency
I worry about Joyent as a company. They have very interesting talent, but end
up doing some sketchy things.

For years, they successfully positioned themselves as a "competitor" to AWS in
the press. But at the time, they were a simple hosting provider with no API
and no self-provisioning. Of course, the press didn't know any better and kept
printing that they were a competitor. But even today, Gartner doesn't even
consider them a competitor to AWS.

[http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2IH2LGI&c...](http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2IH2LGI&ct=150626&st=sb)

Triton seems to be a _very_ limited port of "Docker" to their custom version
of Solaris. For example, it supports only one "\--volumes-from" argument per
container. And I'd be worried running on an OS supported by basically one
company.

[https://www.joyent.com/developers/triton-
faq](https://www.joyent.com/developers/triton-faq)

It's also important to note that their S3 knock-off has had an embarrassing
8-day outage. Oops. They literally didn't have any backups, because they
didn't think they needed them with ZFS!

[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyen...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyent-
services-back-after-8-day-outage/)

~~~
bcantrill
Disclaimer: I'm the CTO for Joyent.

Normally I wouldn't respond to something that is so clearly a troll, but I
wouldn't want someone to stumble on this and confuse what you've said for the
truth. So at the risk of feeding the trolls...

First, the Gartner magic quadrant that you quoted is for cloud storage, not
for cloud infrastructure as a service. We _are_ in the MQ for cloud
infrastructure as a service[1], in which Gartner has this to say about us:

 _Joyent has long been an advocate of OS containers, and the growing
popularity of container technologies, especially Docker, has been beneficial
both for its service and software businesses. Joyent 's architecture is well-
suited to running containers securely within a multitenant environment, and it
is one of the first providers to launch a Docker-based container service.
Because Joyent maintains a single codebase across its own service offerings
and the cloud infrastructure framework software that it sells, customers can
more easily consume Joyent technology in a hybrid fashion._

Now, to be fair, we're by no means AWS-sized and we're not trying to be
everything to all people -- which Gartner also points out, under "Cautions":

 _Joyent focuses on developing its own technology, and has a track record of
releasing innovative capabilities. However, it faces a long-term challenge to
compete against providers with greater development resources. Joyent has a
capable basic cloud IaaS offering, but its feature set is strongly oriented
toward cloud-native use cases, and it is highly developer-centric._

On the particular point of "worry about Joyent as a company", Gartner adds:

 _Joyent needs an ecosystem of third-party tools that support its platform,
along with a software marketplace, and managed and professional service
partners. Although Joyent can take advantage of the growing Docker ecosystem,
it must find ways to bring that ecosystem to its platform, and that ecosystem
will not by itself be sufficient to support customer needs._

I feel that that's a pretty balanced view: we have been longtime advocates of
containers; we're focused on hybrid-cloud and Docker use cases; and we have
the challenges endemic to being a much smaller player relative to AWS, Google
and Microsoft.

As for the limitations of Triton and the divergences from Docker, we are very
explicit about them[2]. Yes, there are limitations (e.g., missing support for
"docker build"), but what is there is production-grade -- and we're busily
working on filling in the gaps. (Which, given the degree to which the entire
ecosystem is in flux, is better than par for the course.) Further, if you look
at the enthusiasm in the community[3][4], it's clear that the choices we've
made in Triton solve real production problems.

Finally, in terms of that 8-day outage from over seven years ago: Joyent
divested from that service six years ago.[5] In its stead, we built Manta, a
container-oriented storage service that has been in production since 2013.[6]
I'm not seeking to defend the outage that you refer to (though it pre-dates me
personally at the company and I know very few of the technical details
surrounding it), but it's important to put it in its context -- and to make
clear that this hasn't been Joyent's storage offering for the better half of a
decade.

[1]
[http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2G2O5FC&c...](http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2G2O5FC&ct=150519&st=sb)

[2] [https://docs.joyent.com/public-
cloud/containers/docker/diver...](https://docs.joyent.com/public-
cloud/containers/docker/divergence)

[3]
[https://twitter.com/ahl/status/626801451663294465](https://twitter.com/ahl/status/626801451663294465)

[4]
[https://twitter.com/Sirupsen/status/626840507235311617](https://twitter.com/Sirupsen/status/626840507235311617)

[5] [https://www.joyent.com/blog/joyent-sells-strongspace-and-
bin...](https://www.joyent.com/blog/joyent-sells-strongspace-and-bingodisk-to-
expandrive)

[6]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5939340)

------
PaulHoule
I dunno. From the viewpoint of "ease of use" AWS definitely can use a layer to
improve things.

~~~
nzoschke
Author of the post here. I agree. But that has always been the case. My best
understanding is that AWS focuses on system correctness and leaves experience
to the ecosystem.

