California-based software and services firm Joyent said on 6 June that it will discontinue its public cloud offering – which competed with the likes of market-leader Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud and Microsoft – three years after it was acquired by South Korean technology conglomerate Samsung.
Like its better known competitors, Joyent provided developers with the opportunity to rent computing capacity from its datacenters on a pay-as-you-go basis but will leave the public cloud sphere in November and focus its resources elsewhere, instead of continuing to compete head-to-head with Amazon Web Services.
Joyent will specifically focus on so-called “single-tenant” cloud services, providing a dedicated chunk of computing infrastructure to a single customer, a service that it said Samsung currently uses. Joyent will also continue to provide cloud software for customers’ own data centers and servers.
Samsung acquired Joyent in June 2016 for US$125 million, taking one of very few independent competitors to Amazon Web Services off the market. According to Business Insider, Joyent was backed by Peter Thiel, Intel Capital, and others. The company was an early proponent of software container technology, which has since been popularized by US$1.3 billion startup Docker and an open source cloud project called Kubernetes.
“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,” Steve Tuck, president and chief operating officer of Joyent, said in a blog post published on the company’s website.
“Starting in November, we will be scaling back the availability of the Joyent Public Cloud to customers of our single-tenant cloud offering,” he said, adding that the company is “currently working on finding different homes” for its on-demand cloud customers.
“For some that will involve deploying the same open source software that powers the Joyent Public Cloud today in their own datacenter or on a BMaaS provider like SoftLayer with our help and ongoing support,” Tuck said.
“For those customers that don’t have the level of scale for their own datacenter or to run BMaaS, we have taken the time to evaluate different options to support this transition, and have been hard at work to make the experience as smooth as possible,” he added. “To that end, we are proud to say that we have many partners working with us to support the transition for customers who wish to move to alternative on-demand clouds.”