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Triton
Company blog · tritondatacenter.com/blog · on HN as nwilkenssystemsprogramming
Triton is the company blog at tritondatacenter.com, writing about systems and programming. Since 2022, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “SmartOS”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
No feed foundVisit the blog
25mentions?
16HN people?
2022–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite the Triton (SmartOS) team's blog for Bryan Cantrill's essays, including the unikernel critique, the empathy-in-engineering post, and ZFS recovery, plus SmartOS and illumos news.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Triton DataCenter is designed for efficiency and superior control, offering a robust and scalable solution for your evolving business needs.
Most-linked posts?
- SmartOS4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-09-18
- /blog/a-new-chapter-begins-for-triton-and-smartos3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-29
- TCP Puzzlers (2016)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-10
- /blog/unikernels-are-unfit-for-production2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-30
What Hacker News says?
SmartOS is being actively developed since the aquisition from Joyent[1] in April 2022. We've released a new version every two weeks post acquisition, and are continuing to develop and invest. We also hold office hours events roughly every two weeks on Discord[2], and would love for you to stop by and ask any questions, or just listen along! [1]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/a-new-chapter-begins-f... [2]: ht…
Comment linking /blog/a-new-chapter-begins-for-triton-and-smartos
on “Helios: A distribution of Illumos powering the Oxide Rack”Submitted TCP Puzzlers (2016) as a story · 86 points
HN discussionMNX Solutions (SmartOS/Triton DataCenter) | Senior Backend Developer | Monroe, MI or Remote (US Preferred) | Full time | $150k+ | 100% paid benefits MNX has recently acquired Triton DataCenter[1] and commercial support business from Joyent[2], and we are working on building the next generation of the platform. Take a look at the GitHub repo for an idea of what we're up to: https://github.com/tritondatacenter . Ideal…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)”Submitted TCP Puzzlers as a story · 6 points
HN discussionTriton DataCenter[1] is open source[2], and has commercial revenue in excess of $1M ARR. We were fortunate to acquire this product from Joyent earlier this year[3], and are now well on our way to the next revenue target. Triton was built on the backs of giants -- so a slightly different scenario than most.. But it is clear that customers will pay for open source products, and you can more than pay your rent one day!…
Comment linking /
on “How to pay your rent with your open source project (2020)”Submitted SmartOS as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI really like this description of how baremetal infrastructure should work, and this is where I think (shameless self promotion) Triton DataCenter[1] plays really well today on-prem. PXE booted lightweight compute nodes with a robust API, including operator portal, user portal, and cli. Keep an eye out for the work we are doing with Triton Linux + K8s. Very lightweight Triton Linux compute node + baremetal k8s deplo…
Comment linking /
on “AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing”I feel like learning how to configure bird, bind, haproxy, rdbms clusters, redundant MXs, etc. has taught me far more than spinning up equivalent virtual infrastructure on a public cloud would have. Getting to play with the underlying FOSS technologies is far more rewarding to me than using the commercialized versions on someone else's stack. Plus it helps me evaluate and architect my products for competing clouds,…
Comment linking /blog/manta-postmortem-7-27-2015
on “Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill”These posts always remind me of the [Manta Object Storage]( https://www.tritondatacenter.com/triton/object-storage ) project by Joyent. This project was basically a combination of object storage with the added ability to run arbitrary programs against your data in situ. The primary, and key, difference being that you kept the data in place and distributed the program to the data storage nodes (the opposite of most d…
Comment linking /triton/object-storage
on “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)”https://mnx.io -- We recently acquired Joyent Triton DataCenter[0,1,2] and commercial business, and are expanding our datacenter footprint this year. Triton is open source[3], so you can run it in your own facility, at home, and our Public Cloud with the same experience. [0]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com [1]: https://www.joyent.com/blog/a-new-chapter-begins-for-triton-... [2]: https://www.mnxsolutions.com/triton…
Comment linking /
on “Linode Managed Databases”We're definitely seeing an uptick in interest for Triton Datacenter[1] from vSphere users looking for alternatives. Aside from Triton, there's a quite a bit of interest in Proxmox and XCP-ng in the community. While alternatives are gaining popularity, they certainly do not have the same ecosystem that VMware users are accustomed to. Organizations are going to have to pony up, or make concessions. [1]: https://www.tr…
Comment linking /
on “VMware Kills Off 56 Products”I have also used SmartOS, which imports KVM from Linux. It is odd to boot it and see sendmail running from my native ksh93 root login. https://www.tritondatacenter.com/smartos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartOS
Comment linking /smartos
on “OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution”Bryan Cantrill, "Unikernels are unfit for production" See: https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/unikernels-are-unfit-f...
Comment linking /blog/unikernels-are-unfit-for-production
on “Toro: Deploy Applications as Unikernels”I really enjoy working with illumos on my home server. I run SmartOS[1] and it's zone management is great and the webui they've been working on is pretty cool too. 1. https://www.tritondatacenter.com/smartos
Comment linking /smartos
on “illumos”Related: https://www.tritondatacenter.com/smartos Source: https://github.com/TritonDataCenter/smartos-live SmartOS Hosting (Note: I would like to find a more comprehensive list of hosting providers that specifically support SmartOS): https://mnx.io/ SmartOS – The Converged Container and Virtual Machine Hypervisor for the Modern Data Center https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/smartos-the-converged-... Old HN relate…
Comment linking /smartos
on “SmartOS – An OS Specifically Written for VMs, Virtualization and Containers”I strongly disagree. I believe empathy as a core engineering value is universally shared amongst the best. [1][2][3] 1: https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun 2: https://oxide.computer/principles 3: https://illumos.topicbox.com/groups/developer/T1c9b33b1b2535...
Comment linking /blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
on “Ask HN: Coworker does not work, at all. What to do?”Did you ask in a github discussion in the openzfs project? That would be my first place to get expert knowlegde. Maybe you can try some of the following: https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/zfs-forensics-recoveri... I'm pretty sure you lost your data.
Comment linking /blog/zfs-forensics-recovering-files-from-a-destroyed-zpool
on “ZFS Label Borked – Looking for hex help”> control/configuration/debugging This is one of several major arguments made against unikernels in that famous Triton rant from a decade ago: https://tritondatacenter.com/blog/unikernels-are-unfit-for-p... Basically, even if your application _can_ run as the kernel, and it's desirable for it to run with kernel-level permissions, do you really want production to be a world without strace and iotop and the like?
Comment linking /blog/unikernels-are-unfit-for-production
on “Boot Naked Linux”I did not know that! https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/a-new-chapter-begins-f...
Comment linking /blog/a-new-chapter-begins-for-triton-and-smartos
on “SmartOS”SmartOS is the core operating system for Triton datacenter -- https://www.tritondatacenter.com; Triton is the orchestration of SmartOS compute nodes. Code + issues are active under https://github.com/TritonDataCenter (smartos-live, illumos-joyent, triton, etc.), and docs are at https://docs.smartos.org/ . SmartOS is released every two weeks, and Triton is released every 8 weeks -- see https://www.tritondatacenter.co…
Comment linking /downloads
on “SmartOS”It was acquired again in 2022 by MNX [1]. [1] https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/a-new-chapter-begins-f...
Comment linking /blog/a-new-chapter-begins-for-triton-and-smartos
on “SmartOS”Our team from Triton DataCenter & SmartOS[1] is also working on an immutable Linux distribution[2] based on Debian + ZFS + LXC. Currently this is supported on Triton DataCenter only, but our internal roadmap has us building a standalone version similar to how folks use SmartOS standalone. [1]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com/smartos [2]: https://github.com/TritonDataCenter/linux-live
Comment linking /smartos
on “Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems”I'm reminded of Bryan Cantrill's talk "Debugging Under Fire"[1], which includes a retrospective of sorts about an entire datacenter rebooting.[2] That is a pretty large-scale disaster, but even that is a rung below a continent-wide outage. Poor "Bill" must have saw the proverbial light when he heard some folks wanted to trash the DIASTER script. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30jNsCVLpAE [2]: https://www.trito…
Comment linking /blog/postmortem-for-outage-of-us-east-1-may-27-2014
on “Cold restart whole system after total outage”I appreciate that when unexpected outcomes occur it's tempting to vent frustrations and say things in a way intended to influence the feelings of others to validate our own frustrations and feelings. However, as a former colleague of mine (Bryan Cantrill) frequently reminds everyone, empathy is a core engineering value : https://tritondatacenter.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun I completed the second decade of my sof…
Comment linking /blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
on “Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11”I think that part of it is that relatively few people use bare-metal servers these days, and nested virtualisation isn't universally supported. I also found this technical critique [0] compelling, but I have no idea if any of it is accurate or not. [0]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/unikernels-are-unfit-f...
Comment linking /blog/unikernels-are-unfit-for-production
on “Hands-On Introduction to Unikernels”
