29 8 / 2012
Special Thanks to Nodesters!
When I set out to start the Nodester open source PaaS project 1.5 years ago, I had no intention of building and running a 24x7 Node.JS PaaS. I simply wanted to learn Node.JS and the nuances of hosting Node.JS apps in a public and private cloud environment.
With the help of the open source community (specifically @DavGlass and @DanBUK), I learned about Linux chroot sandbox securing of apps. I would also like to thank the following developers who have contributing to the Nodester project over the years: @_Alejandromg @Eschoff @Marcosvm @Abraham @MichealBenedict, @Crp_underground @AdamKumpf @Krwindham @Akavlie @eldios @Tenzer @Eocampospy @Fgnass @JP_pinilla Yawnt @WeAreFractal MintPlant Ckknight @Arvidhahldev @stephanepericat and @Kev_nz. As of late, @_AlejandroMG has been my wingman on this rocketship ride and has proven himself to be an amazing Node.JS developer, thoughtleader, and most patient support engineer. I would work with any of you again in a heartbeat!
I would also like to give a shoutout to @Tropo @VoxeoLabs and @IrisCouch for their hosting sponsorships which have allowed us to offer our hosting services to the Node.JS community for free since day one!
I am proud to say that Nodester was the first 100% open source Node.JS PaaS solution available for developers and it’s still one of the few Node.JS platforms that supports native WebSockets! The Nodester community is passionate about open source public, private, and hybrid cloud PaaS services and has proven that open source projects can become viable businesses.
Upon accepting a new career opportunity with Bechtel, it became clear to me that I could no longer support the growing demands of our susccessful open source project and free hosting service. I looked at the various leading PaaS providers out there and it became clear that the only one with our vision and mission was AppFog. They, too, were very excited about taking over the Nodester project and ultimately adding our realtime websocket technology into their CloudFoundry platform.
This partnership between AppFog and Nodester will give our Node.JS developers the very best public and private PaaS hosting solution as Node.JS continues to grow and extend into the enterprise. I am very proud of our accomplishments and have made many new friends throughout this endeavor. With that, I have one last thing to say…..Hack the planet! \m/
Cheers,
Links to the press coverage at the time of this post:
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19 2 / 2012
Rocketeers Wanted
In just a little over 1 year, Nodester has grown to over 3,000 registered Node.JS developers hosting nearly 4,000 apps on our free open source PaaS. We would like to thank Tropo for continuing to fund our hosting fees on AWS as well as the following key individuals for making Nodester what it is today: Chris Matthieu, Contra, Dav Glass, and Daniel Bartlett.
Our mission has been to bring an open source Node.JS PaaS and free hosting services to the market in an attempt to accelerate the adoption of Node.JS as well as to provide fellow nodesters and companies with a platform to deploy private nodester clouds. We believe that we have succeeded on our original mission. Now what?
Most of the original team has moved on to other projects except Chris Matthieu, the founder of Nodester. He is still supporting the ongoing operations and contributing to the code base as time permits (evenings and weekends). Despite having no funding or full-time resources dedicated to this open source project, Nodester still stacks up nicely against the commercial Node.JS hosting providers in the industry including: Joyent and Heroku! There is even a new commercial offering called CloudNode that is built on top of the Nodester PaaS. Here is the hosting services matrix maintained on Joyent’s repo:
https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Node-Hosting
We still have big ideas for Nodester including:
- Better sandboxing with support for any version of node.js
- NPM installer for dead simple private cloud deployments
- Public Amazon Machine Image availability
- Admin panel for an easier browser-based view of your account
- Horizontal scaling of the platform with application auto-scaling capabilities
- OpenStack Integration for simple Rackspace deployments
The community has big ideas for Nodester too but we need your help to continue to support the service and contribute to advancing our open source Node.JS PaaS forward! Every little bit helps from ideas to documentation to working on the admin panel or installer to even jumping into the core Nodester code base on github. In addition to Node.JS development assistance, we are also looking for a few strong Linux system engineers to help us maintain the nodester.com service platform as well as assist us with new sandboxing techniques such as deploying LXC containers or other innovative ideas.
What’s in it for you? How about: Nodester fame, contributing back to the Node.JS community, solving interesting new PaaS problems, working with cutting-edge technology, free Node.JS hosting resources and all of the Nodester stickers that you can pass out to your friends.
Rocketeers Wanted: If you are interested in becoming a Nodester Rocketeer, please contact Chris Matthieu via Twitter or email him at chris [at] nodester.com. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!
H A C K T H E P L A N E T ! ! !
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