Joyent Raises $15M to Further Develop Docker Application Containers
The development of cloud technology is allowing individuals and organizations of all sizes to access applications, platforms, infrastructures and security solutions that in the past would have been out of their price range. Cloud also delivers the flexibility and scalability so businesses can grow as needed without the prohibitive CAPEX and OPEX of traditional systems. Companies that deliver innovative solutions in this industry are receiving large investments from VCs looking to capitalize on the future of IT. Joyent, a high-performance cloud infrastructure and big data analytics company, has raised $15 million in a new round of funding bringing its overall total to $120 million, including an $85 million Series D round in 2012.
The company stated in its blog this round was led by existing investors Intel Capital, Orascom TMT Investments, El Dorado Ventures, EPIC Ventures, LGI Ventures and others. The company’s CEO, Scott Hammond, said the funds will allow the organization to take its infrastructure container platform to Docker's application container ecosystem.
Regarding the search for new funding, he told Frederic Lardinois of TechCrunch, “To me, it’s all about speed, we’re at the beginning of a high speed technology shift. While it took VMWare many years to go from developer test environments to mass adoption, today’s technologies get to mass adoption much faster. We raised this round to speed up development so we can be one of the drivers in this next wave of disruptive technology.”
The CEO goes on to say the company’s goal is to serve both developers and operations teams by making its technology available to bridge the gap between developer enthusiasm for Docker and the need to run containers securely in production.
Joyent has been running a container-based platform for more than 10 years, but the increased visibility the company received was achieved after it introduced Docker.
“Our customers are rapidly adopting Docker to create application containers, and they are seeking to use this new technology on Joyent’s proven infrastructure containers,” said Hammond. “We believe that this specific combination of application containers and infrastructure containers will completely disrupt the data center and transform how business applications are built and delivered.”
Hammond said in the blog, the company was an early adopter of OS containers and it was running containers in production as far back as 2006, “before we even called the cloud the cloud.”
Once Joyent proved containers could run securely, in production and at scale, Hammond saw the company was positioned to start delivering the next wave of structure technology. Using an operating system virtualization layer which is a combination of OpenSolaris and Linux’s KVM virtualization technology called SmartOS, it runs Docker containers on bare metal.
Some of the features of Joyent include:
- Ability to resize their entire application stack including multiple layers without rebooting or requiring down time.
- A storage technology that includes ZFS file system in and its Compute Service, classic NFS hosting, and the multi-datacenter object store in Joyent Manta Service.
- Cloud Analytics tools powered by DTrace, to generate powerful, real-time graphs that provide a greater level of accuracy when troubleshooting performance problems.
- Support for thousands of software applications, application runtime environments, and other products and implements industry-standard and detailed APIs to expose all of the underlying features, capabilities and data.
According to the company, Joyent is the only solution in the industry to deploy Zones, a technology that acts as an additional, “steel-wall” to prevent neighboring tenants from attacking each other. Compared to legacy cloud architectures, Zones delivers reliable internal security in multi-tenant environments.
Edited by Maurice Nagle
