Joyent Launches Triton, Its New Container Infrastructure For Easier Docker Deployments

Joyent today announced the launch of Triton, its new container infrastructure for making Docker deployments in on-premise clouds and on its own cloud architecture easier. This announcement comes about half a year after the company raised $15 million with the stated goal of releasing exactly this kind of service (after previously raising $120 million).

Joyent argues that while Docker brings lots of new efficiencies to the development and deployment process, it also introduces new complexities, because you have to manage multiple containers and hosts, and wrangle with networking implementations and security issues.

Overall, Triton is made up of a number of components which include some of Joyent’s existing offerings. There are the Docker containers at the center of the service, which are managed by the Triton Docker Engine and run on top of Joyent’s Triton Container Hypervisor. In addition, Triton features its own software-defined networking infrastructure service and a DevOps Portal for managing the service.

Here is how Triton fits into Joyent’s overall offerings (including its open source tools):

Triton Naming

Joyent promises that Triton allows developers and devops teams to treat the entire datacenter as a single container host while it manages the complexities in the background. At the same time, Joyent promises that its SmartOS virtualization layer allows it to bring bare metal-like performance to Docker containers. The company also notes how Triton offers real-time monitoring and post-mortem debugging tools, as well as the ability to easily resize and scale containers as needed.

One thing that sets Joyent’s service apart from similar platforms is that the company charges per containers and not per virtual machine. As part of this launch, the company is also introducing a new instance with lower pricing compared to its previous low-end machines.

“[It’s] Joyent’s ability to securely run containers on multi-tenant bare-metal brings with it performance and pricing advantages that put it in a class by itself,” Joyent product manager Casey Bisson told me yesterday when I asked him how Joyent’s service fit in with existing Docker management tools like Google’s Kubernetes. “The network virtualization offers similar convenience and performance advantages that can’t be matched by alternative solutions.”

He also argues that Joyent’s SmartOS “is a key factor in our ability to deliver these advantages, but the expression of these advantages to host Docker containers represents new work and a number of significant innovations not seen elsewhere.”

Triton is now available as a preview on for Joyent’s public cloud customers. Enterprises that want to run the service on-premise can also deploy Triton Enterprise in their own data centers.

2015-03-23_1108