Case Study

Joyent - “Without BIG-IP LTM, we wouldn’t have had a business, to be honest.”

One of Web 2.0’s ultimate web services is cloud computing—super-scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Joyent, Inc. has developed a fast-growing business and is especially known for its secure, enterprise-grade IaaS cloud that is application-aware and built on open source code and standards.

Business Challenge

Joyent’s compelling value proposition has led to its explosive growth. For as little as $45 per month, any one of Joyent’s more than 25,000+ customers can, on demand,
tap into as many as eight CPU cores at once, 32 GB of RAM, and 10 Gbps throughput.
For little cost, customers get a virtual slice of a multimillion-dollar IT infrastructure, most of which is available to them if their applications need to scale quickly. So, without large capital outlays and any long-term vendor contracts, Joyent customers can host and scale their applications easily and cost-effectively, all with tremendous flexibility and business agility.

The customer that best illustrates Joyent’s scalability is LinkedIn, which hosts its wildly successful Facebook application Bumpersticker on Joyent’s IaaS. The largest Ruby on Rails application ever, Bumpersticker grew to more than one billion page views a month within two months after launch.

Behind this kind of dynamic scale and capability are “Joyent Accelerators,” a range of virtualized servers and virtual data center architectures. According to Joyent CTO and founder Jason Hoffman, his company needed much more than load balancing to manage these servers and all the various traffic generated by its many customers. Because customers use Joyent’s open cloud to deliver applications, Joyent’s architecture needed to be application-aware.

Solution

“BIG-IP LTM is the only Application Delivery Controller capable of scaling to handle the thousands of back-end systems Joyent needs to thrive,” he added, noting that Joyent load-balances thousands of instances of web and application servers. “Without BIG-IP LTM, we wouldn’t have had a business, to be honest.”

Joyent deployed active/passive pairs of F5 BIG-IP LTM devices in front of its Joyent Accelerators, which are built on a custom distribution of OpenSolaris. These operate within a network environment based on Force 10’s super-fast and highly reliable core switches and routers.

Joyent also uses iRules’ powerful yet simple scripting capabilities for quickly and easily developing traffic regulations and security policies. “For security, it’s better than any hardware-based firewall I can put in front of a customer’s accelerator,” he said.

“Application connection inspection like what BIG-IP LTM provides is simply not available anywhere else,” said Hoffman. “With a simple iRule that might be just five lines long, we can scrub out data like Social Security or credit card numbers with virtually no impact on performance.”

Benefits

Hoffman noted that BIG-IP LTM and iRules have been the foundation to Joyent’s business of providing cost-effective, highly scalable cloud computing to its customers. “There’s nothing like BIG-IP LTM,” he said.

•Up to 80% traffic reduction

iRules’ programming flexibility and precise application delivery control have enabled Joyent to provide a computing cloud that is application-aware. Hoffman noted, “iRules ended up becoming a critical component for scaling the LinkedIn app to the billions of page views it invokes each month…we fired those up and pretty much 80 percent of the traffic diminished immediately.”
He explained that the BIG-IP LTM devices processed five short iRules one billion times for each page request that came in and the devices’ CPU graph stayed flat. In effect, by sitting on the edge of the Joyent open cloud, BIG-IP LTM takes the load off the application and servers, enabling them to focus on serving non-repetitive requests. This makes it possible to keep applications up and running while giving application developers breathing room to work on enhancing the scalability of their applications.

•On-demand scalability

Hoffman said that Joyent’s cost-effectiveness is not as much a value to its customers as is
the flexibility Joyent’s open computing cloud provides, thanks in great part to BIG-IP LTM. “Value emerges in how Joyent can give customers the ability to scale up and down based on business needs,” he explained. “You can go from a 2 Mbps application to a 10 Gbps Top 50 website pretty much on-demand, but without a long-term contract or having to rewrite your application for our open cloud.” With BIG-IP LTM operating at the edge of its open cloud, Joyent can offer its customers virtually limitless scale.

•Rapid payback in as little as 3 months

Determining a specific return on the investment is difficult, according to Hoffman, because the Joyent open cloud has so many components. But he estimated that inside a two-year timeframe, Joyent generates revenues equal to 200 to 300 percent of its BIG-IP LTM investment. “Typically,” he said, “in a three-to-six-month period, BIG-IP LTM devices have paid for themselves.”

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