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by combatentropy 3653 days ago
From the CTO's blog post, it seems to me that Samsung became interested in Joyent not for its most famous product, Node.js, but for its new product, Manta, which is some sort of serverless, distributed, data-storage and processing service (https://www.joyent.com/manta). Manta might be well-suited for the new hotness, the Internet of Things.

So that's how I saw it progressing. Samsung was looking into how to get in on the Internet of Things, stumbled across Manta, and it went from there.
1 comments
ilaksh 3653 days ago
Manta seems like they are throwing the kitchen sink at those problems, tons of containers, proprietary OS, proxies, etc.

If you want to store objects in a distributed way, why not just use something like RethinkDB, which has proxying/sharding etc. built in? RethinkDB even has a way to execute code with 'js'.

Or for serverless processing, why not AWS lambda or the crop of clones?

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melloc 3653 days ago
Manta doesn't run on a proprietary OS, but runs on SmartOS, a distribution of illumos [1][2]. In fact, almost everything at Joyent is open source, including all of Manta [3]. As for why not anything else, Manta has been around since 2013 [4], before other similar solutions, and allows you to run arbitrary programs on your data. As an example, some of our customers run ffmpeg on videos that they upload, to produce different variants to then store in Manta.

[1] https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live

[2] https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent

[3] https://github.com/joyent/manta

[4] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/25/joyent_object_store/

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Annatar 3653 days ago
> proprietary OS

Say what? SmartOS is based on illumos, the only free, open source SVR4 UNIX out there.

Get the code: https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent

Build it! https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Building+SmartOS+on+Sma...

Modify it: https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Developers+Guid...

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jclulow 3653 days ago
For the record, there is no "proprietary [operating system]" involved here. The Triton stack (upon which Manta is based) runs on top of SmartOS[1], a wholly open source operating system built around an illumos[2] core.

[1] https://www.joyent.com/smartos

[2] https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate

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jen20 3653 days ago
> Or for serverless processing, why not AWS lambda or the crop of clones?

Data locality.

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