Joyent Converts Cloud Platform to Open Source

Cloud computing provider Joyent has just announced that they will be converting their cloud platform, SmartDataCenter, to open source.  Joyent will also reposition them self as an infrastructure platform that focuses on containers.

Joyant’s decision comes from the difficulty to stand out from the competition from a marketing standpoint. There are too many other cloud providers and Joyent feels this decision will be much better for them than trying to fight off the competition.

This isn’t the first time that Joyent has opted for open source for one of their solutions. Joyent has been managing a few other open sourced systems including their SmartOS cloud operating system.

Joyant CTO Bryant Cantrill thinks that this move will positively reposition SmartDataCenter among other clouds like Amazon Web Service and Google and set them up to be more like bigger open source projects such as OpenStack.

“This is not an act of altruism,” Cantrill wrote in his blog.  “It is a business decision- if a multifaceted one that we believe has benefits beyond the balance sheet.”

Jason Hoffman, Joyent’s founder and former CTO thinks that the technologies, which include a full API system and multi-data center storage and database systems, will become popular, but only if people take the time to look at them.

“There are so many hard things fundamentally addressed and implemented in this system,” said Hoffman. “It should be embarrassing when everyone else looks at what they’ve dumped into out into the public domain.”

The only question that remains for Joyent is, is it too little too late? There are already big companies that have successfully open sourced their projects so it remains to be seen if Joyent can stand up to the competition.

Click Here to read more about Joyant’s open source cloud platform.