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Yesterday Joyent announced its departure from the public cloud space. Beginning November 9, 2019, the Joyent Public Cloud, including Triton Compute and Triton Object Storage (Manta), will no longer accept new customers as of June 6, 2019, and will discontinue serving existing customers upon EOL on November 9th.

In 2016, Joyent was acquired by Samsung after it had explored Manta, which is the Joyent’s object storage system, for implementation, Samsung liked the product, hence had bought it. In 2014, Joyent was even praised by Gartner, in its IaaS Magic Quadrant, for having a “unique vision.”

The company had also developed a single-tenant cloud offering for cloud-mature, hyperscale users such as Samsung, who also demand vastly improved cloud costs. Since more resources are required for expanding the single-tenant cloud business, the company had to take this call. The team will continue to build functionality for their open source Triton offering complemented by commercial support options to utilize Triton equivalent private clouds in a single-tenant model.

The official blog post reads, “As that single-tenant cloud business has expanded, the resources required to support it have grown as well, which has led us to a difficult decision.”

Now the current customers have five months to switch and find a new home. The customers need to migrate, backup, or retrieve data running or stored in the Joyent Cloud before November 9th. The company will be removing compute and data from the current public cloud after November 9th and will not be capturing backups of any customer data. Joyent is working towards assisting its customers through the transition with the help of its partners. Some of the primary partners involved in assistance include OVH, Microsoft Azure, Redapt Attunix, and a few more, meanwhile, the additional partners are being finalized.

Users might have to deploy the same open source software that powers the Joyent Public Cloud in their own datacenter or on a BMaaS provider like SoftLayer with the company’s ongoing support. For the ones who don’t have the level of scale for their own datacenter or for running BMaaS, Joyent is evaluating different options to support this transition and make it as smooth as possible.

Steve Tuck, Joyent president and chief operating officer (COO), wrote in the blog post, “To all of our public cloud customers, we will work closely with you over the coming five months to help you transition your applications and infrastructure as seamlessly as possible to their new home.”

He further added, “We are truly grateful for your business and the commitment that you have shown us over the years; thank you.”

All publicly-available data centers including US-West, US-Southwest, US-East 1/2/3/3b, EU-West, and Manta will be impacted by the EOL.

However, the company said that there will be no impact to their Node.js Enterprise Support offering, they will  invest heavily in software support business for both Triton and Node.js support. They will also be shortly releasing a new Node.js Support portal for the customers.

Few think that Joyent’s value proposition got affected because of its public interface. A user commented on HackerNews, “Joyent’s value proposition was killed (for the most part) by the experience of using their public interface. It would’ve taken a great deal of bravery to try that and decide a local install would be better. The node thing also did a lot of damage – Joyent wrote a lot of the SmartOS/Triton command line tools in node so they were slow as hell. Triton itself is a very non-trivial install although quite probably less so than a complete k8s rig.”

Others have expressed remorse on Joyent Public Cloud EOL.

To know more about this news, check out EOL of Joyent Public Cloud.

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