Facebook Application Hosting with Joyent

Early last week I set out to make my first Facebook application (more about this later).  One of the challenges a Facebook application contributor faces is finding hosting.  Luckily for me, I stumbled upon Joyent, which recently partnered with Dell to give away Facebook application virtual hosting for one year. Their Facebook Accelerator - a free virtual machine - supports Java, Ruby on Rails and PHP right out of the box. Great, everything you need plus a dedicated fiber link right to Facebook's data center, for free. But this isn't what makes Joyent intresting.

What intrigued me about Joyent was their use of Open Solaris and virtual hosting using Solaris Containers (Joyent calls these Accelerators). Joyent is different than most other commodity hosting providers who use Linux or FreeBSD or even Windows, for a premium.  .  For those of you not up to speed on your Sun trivia, Solaris Containers is a radically differnet virtualization technique than the approach being pushed by VMware, Red Hat, Xen and others. Instead of virtualizing a full operating system, the host is partitioned into zones, which run on a single kernel instance but run multiple isolated process trees, one per zone. Think of them as an extension FreeBSD's Jails concept. What you end up with is a secure virtual machine that doesn't require all the overhead of multiple operating systems plus a fair share scheduler that can guarantee CPU resources to each container. You can read more about Solaris Containers here.

Joyent is the first hosting provider I've seen pull this off in such an attractive way. Their Accelerators are very easy to use thanks to their inclusion of most GNU tools and popular open source softare, plus an active community forum. With the advent of Open Solaris, it will be interesting to see if other providers entertain the Solaris Containers concept and make it work as well as Joyent.