Joyent Acquires Reasonably Smart to Take On Google App Engine

There are two issues that developers face when picking a cloud hosting environment. Either they have to worry about managing their infrastructure, meaning additional work when they need to scale rapidly — as is the case with Amazon’s Web Services stack, or Rackspace’s Mosso. Or, they have to worry about technology and vendor lock-in — as is the case with Google’s App Engine, which currently limits developers to writing applications in Python, or Microsoft’s Azure, which right now expects developers to use .NET.

Joyent’s Accelerator cloud computing platform works a lot like the former variety of cloud platform. But today the company announced the acquisition of open source cloud computing platform Reasonably Smart, which makes theirs slightly more of a hybrid approach.

Reasonably Smart is described by Joyent Founder and CEO David Young as “an auto-scaling platform-as-a-service; it is a direct, open-source competitor to Google App Engine.” The open source platform, which is currently in alpha, takes care of scaling and architecture issues for the developer, while expecting them to use JavaScript to write their back end code. Reasonably Smart adds extensions to accomplish things JavaScript wasn’t originally designed to do, such as storage.

Though JavaScript isn’t generally thought of as a server-side language, Young writes that he expects that it “will become the language of scale for the web.” The platform is also expected to add support for other languages in the coming months.

What makes Joyent + Reasonably Smart different than App Engine or Azure, is that because Reasonably Smart is open source and will remain that way, developers don’t have to worry so much about vendor lock-in. Joyent will offer Reasonably Smart via their Accelerators (starting in a couple of months), but developers can always download it and run it anywhere else — meaning they can leave Joyent at any time (or skip Joyent altogether).

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Related posts:

1. Google Hints at App Engine Pricing It has been difficult for developers to budget for...
2. App Engine to Add Offline Processing, XMPP Google App Engine -- an important part of Google's Web...
3. Keyboardr: An App Launcher for the Web If the web is really going to be an operating...
4. Opera Fights Back: Announces Next Gen JavaScript Engine At one time, Opera had the fastest ECMAScript / JavaScript...
5. I Can’t Believe it’s Not a Web App! Take Your Skills to the Desktop and Win. Did you know that you could use your CSS, HTML...

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 2:52 pm, contains 411 words, 7 images, and is filed under News & Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. The views and opinions in this blog post are those of its author.