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back to article Joyent tools up for Amazon battle

After almost a year of continuous technical development, Cloudant is taking the wraps off of a database-as-a-service product served out of data centers operated by Joyent – a product that looks to be technically superior to its nearest as-a-service rival, Amazon's DyanamoDB. The deal was announced on Thursday and will see …

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  1. Ian Yates
    Headmaster

    DBaaS

    So, what is a normal database, if it isn't a "service"?

    (icon: it was that or troll)

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  2. Tim Parker

    "The company, which has taken money from the CIA's investment wing In-Q-Tel and Samsung Ventures, is deepening its collaboration with Joyent to gain customers and also to use cloud's [sic] integrated dynamic tracing ('dtrace') technology"

    Ermmm - why would you need to work with Joyent to use dtrace ?

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    1. Tom 38
      Reply Icon

      The point is that their DB has specific DTrace hooks to instrument various things. You can of course use DTrace to examine almost anything, but examining something that has been designed for DTrace gives you massively more useful data for much less work.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Dtrace

      You don't have to work with Joyent to use Dtrace. However, Joyent employs at least one of the guys who wrote Dtrace (Bryan Cantrill), and are constantly improving it. If you want features added to dtrace for say... your specific database workload, you either host your infrastructure with Joyent and request those features, or try to hire away the guys who are writing the code. I'm guessing that Cloudant decided they don't want to be in the OS business and chose to let someone else do that for them.

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      1. Tim Parker
        Reply Icon

        Re: Dtrace

        "... Joyent employs at least one of the guys who wrote Dtrace (Bryan Cantrill), and are constantly improving it."

        Good - I hope they're committing the non-client-specific improvements / specials back to the code base.

        "If you want features added to dtrace for say... your specific database workload, you either host your infrastructure with Joyent and request those features, or try to hire away the guys who are writing the code."

        That's fine for specific needs - not knocking that (although see comment above) but I was somewhat fucked off with the general tone in the article which seems to imply that Dtrace is some unique and wonderful invention of Joyent.

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      2. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Dtrace

        They also have their own fork of OpenSolaris which makes them an interesting cloud provider to watch. It's a shame we don't see The Register have more articles on them and Nexenta.

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        1. Tim Parker
          Reply Icon

          Re: Dtrace

          "They also have their own fork of OpenSolaris "

          Yep - i've not been following them but I hope they're contributing back.

          "which makes them an interesting cloud provider to watch."

          Indeed.

          "It's a shame we don't see The Register have more articles on them and Nexenta."

          Agreed, IMO there is a lot to like about Solaris in open or semi-closed state. I've started dabbling with Nexenta a while ago - originally for a home NAS project two or three years back - their stuff was very nicely put together with the obvious benefit of ZFS. In light of recent Linux GUI "innovations" I might try the OS on my dev laptop again (wasn't quite there last time I looked).

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  3. Tom 38

    This is interesting, but scaling NoSQL is not exactly hard. Wake me up when someone has a DBaaS that offers an RDBMS with insta-scaling.

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