One door has closed, another has opened

As I had written previously, my old company, Scalable Informatics, has closed. Read that posting to see why and how, but as with all things … we must move forward. It is cliche' to use the title phrase. But it is also true. We know the door that closed. It’s the door that has opened afterwards that I am focusing upon. I have joined Joyent to work on, as it turns out, many similar things to what I did at Scalable. Building and supporting awesome hardware, helping provide operational capability to end users for the platform, working with partners and vendors to bring value to the Joyent public cloud, and many other things. Due to the nature of what I’ll be working on, there is a very strong HPC component to it, though I don’t think the team is using the HPC word quite yet … that is fine. I’ve not left the market, I’ve not redefined the market so I wouldn’t leave it. Joyent, for those who don’t know, have a set of very interesting product offerings, and a tremendous team around them. As a company, Joyent was a startup, recently acquired by Samsung Mobile. This provides part of what I craved, stability. As I had noted in my previous posts, I was getting tired of running as hard as possible and then head first into challenges that had nothing whatsoever to do with technical merit, deal economics, etc. but had everything to do with … well … useless and unreasonable measures of perception and stability. I don’t have those issues here. Moreover, I have a strong sense of where I can contribute to the success of the team, the mission objectives, etc. From a technical scenario, the approach to building a data center as a container engine/platform is absolutely brilliant. Your deployment winds up being trivial. Your performance, since you are running on bare metal, is tremendous. That is one of the things that really drew me to Joyent years ago. There’s a right way to do containers/VMs and ways that aren’t right. Joyent does these right. No system is perfect, all have challenges of one sort or the other. I am well aware of the challenges for the Triton platform, but I am simultaneously, far less concerned about them, as compared to other platforms. In the lead up to Joyent, I spoke to many other groups about positions, and I’ll have a writeup on that later (without naming names, just talking about the process and some of the odd things that came up). For an old HPC hand like me, I was at least a little amused by some of the other groups insistence that you didn’t need feature X for HPC and HPC like things … when the HPC world had pretty clearly spoken over the last decade in demanding feature X. The position boiled down to “well, we don’t have it, so no one needs it.” Which, if you look at this, was marketing drivel being repeated by engineering resources. Contrast to to Joyent. Who detailed for me “we are here” and “this is where we need to be”. With a very well understood path between the two locations. There’s no “we know better”. There was quite a bit of “what do we have to do to get better, and be better.” This is what I like. The team is phenomenal. Really. The tech … I’ve gushed on about it in the past in these pages … but its very good. There’s a few tech challenges, but the cool thing is that I get to help make those less of a concern by helping to find solutions to them. Which I’ve done once before for this platform. And now I have a wider remit, and don’t have to worry myself with making my monthly numbers to pay the team. You see why I like this yet? Add to this, some of the needs from the parent company. Just like in the original Jurassic park

… I know this stuff. I lived and breathed the stuff they need for most of my professional life. And did I mention the awesome team? Great products? Incredible market and market ops? It took a friend to reconnect me with the team. What was supposed to be a 30 minute call wound up taking all afternoon. I was positively giddy after it. And I am now onboard. Running as hard as I can to catch up and not slow them down. Hopefully to help them accelerate, even harder and faster than before. This is a good thing, stay tuned! Note: I won’t be able to blog much about internal things (as I had hinted at, at Scalable). But I will likely drop hints on things that I am allowed to talk about, or that people might wish to pay attention to. And remember that I’ve not left HPC, nor the market behind. This role encompasses everything I’ve done before … plus quite a bit more stuff. This is good. Very good!