The Nodestack series has been picking up steam and we're exited to be returning for tomorrow's edition. The focus is 'Production Stack', and our goal is to take a detailed look at how key players in the technology community have implemented and maintained real world deployments of Node.js, MongoDB, and SmartOS.

Sign up to join us tomorrow where Paul Serby of Clock will talk about the marriage of frontend and backend technology for optimal UX, MongoLab CEO Will Schuman will discuss running MongoDB in the cloud, and Anton Whalley of NearForm will deep dive on their use of Dtrace.

Finally, Charlie Robbins and Isaac Schlueter will return for a conversation on npm.

NodeStack is tomorrow, June 18th, from 10am - 11:30am PT. Go ahead and RSVP!

Working at Nodejitsu has taught me few important things. One of them is that when running at scale, nothing is easy anymore. Small problems might become huge and escalate surprisingly quickly. Things I didn't even think about before wind up being a challenge.

One of those things I didn't even think about before is managing SSH keys (authorized_keys) across machines. As easy as "just fetch them from somewhere with curl" seems, it doesn't scale up to thousands of servers.

Today Nodejitsu is excited to announce that we have acquired IrisCouch along with its suite of Database-as-a-Service and npm products. This acquisition continues to enhance our toolset for our Enterprise and Public Cloud customers. There is a related press release available on nodejitsu.com.

There are a number of reasons we are thrilled to bring IrisCouch into the Nodejitsu team:

Last October, Nodejitsu got together with our partners, Joyent, 10gen, Clock, and MongoLab, and brought you Nodestack. It was a one day online conference with the goal of examining the technology stack emerging around Node.js, and answering critical industry questions about adopting and maintaining this technology in your own company. The conference was a great success so we're back, and we're bringing you a series of smaller webinars to delve deeper into more specific technical matters.

Join us on Tuesday 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM PT for Nodestack: State of the Stack, where Charlie and Nuno will be holding it down with Isaac Schleuter and Aaron Heckman:

In our April 30th blog post, Nodejitsu announced price increases for customers running on Individual Plans on our hosting platform. You can find the new numbers and details of additional platform changes here. This post is a reminder that these changes are taking place, and a response to a few questions from our customers.

Initially we gave two weeks notice, and scheduled price changes for Wednesday May 15th. Many customers have felt this was not enough time. My team and I heard your feedback, and have pushed the changes out one more week. Wednesday May 22nd is now the day that our new prices will go into effect.

We also received questions regarding the ascending price of our plans. For example, some people have wondered why a Micro plan (1 drone) costs $9 whereas a Small plan (3 drones) costs $33 dollars. This is because our Micro plans (our lowest hosting tier), are being slightly subsidized. We want to continue encouraging experimentation on our PaaS, albeit at a higher price point than before.

In the same spirit of experimentation, Nodejitsu is upholding our commitment to offer a free drone, the equivalent of one Micro plan, to host an open source app to any node.js developer. You simply need to apply through opensource.jit.su.

Nodejitsu's success thus far is due entirely to the support of the node.js community. We understand these price changes have upset some of our customers, but these changes allow us to serve our community sustainably and continue contributing open source software to the node ecosystem. These changes also provide our small but talented team with an opportunity to improve our PaaS, dealing more quickly with production incidents and fixing underlying issues. The goal is to provide our customers with a better product. My team and I are excited to move forward towards a strong future for node, and we look forward to doing so with many members of the node community on our platform.

We are extremely proud to announce that as of May 9th, Ken Perkins is a new pkgcloud committer.

Ken has been putting great amounts of work into pkgcloud, including fixing Rackspace integration and a huge internal refactor which corrects mistakes we made when designing some of the low level APIs. We are extremely thankful for his help and dedication, so we decided to give him push access to our repository.

As of today we are announcing a new pricing structure for our Individual Plans that will take effect on Wednesday May 15th, 2013. The Nodejitsu platform has grown significantly since we launched our Public Beta last year and even more since we launched our Paid Individual and Business Plans. This growth has put us in a position where we need to make some decisive choices in order to create a sustainable future for our Public Cloud product.

Last week we announced OpsMezzo, a complete solution to provisioning, orchestration and configuration management geared towards enterprise customers. That annoucement reflects our commitment to OpenSource and the node.js community. In fact, more than 80% of the nodejitsu stack is now Open Source.

Our prices are the lowest in the Platform-as-a-Service market. Last year when we announced our pricing model we thought we could make this model sustainable, but this was built on several assumptions that turned out to be wrong. With this new model we will be able to keep our Public Cloud sustainable for years to come.

Please note: the changes we are about to discuss apply only to customers using Individual Plans on Nodejitsu’s platform and will not affect Business Plan customers.

After more than 18 months of work, Nodejitsu announced the release of OpsMezzo at TXJS this week, a complete solution to provisioning, orchestration and configuration management.

The majority of OpsMezzo is now available as Open-Source. A related Press Release can be found at nodejitsu.com.

Cloud computing has matured dramatically since Amazon Web Services launched in 2006. A dizzying number of vendors have emerged in the market to solve a wide spectrum of specific problems.

These products have matured over the years, but they are built on a fundamentally flawed thesis: the parts are more important than the whole. In others words: organizations are on their own to integrate individual products into a complete system. Yes, there is a large amount of source material available through blogs, tutorials, and training, but the manual integration work remains.

At it's core, this means that organizations running in "the cloud" are dealing with too many vendors to solve simple problems. Vendors using multiple languages, databases, operating systems and other operational internals. While we live in a polyglot world, the operational calculus of running these multi-vendor systems is challenging to even seasoned professionals.

At this point you are probably wondering: "What about PaaS solutions?" PaaS is great for individuals and organizations who do not have (or do not want to have) an operational competency. This concept of "NoOps", while attractive to some, is also fundamentally flawed:

1. Too simple for larger organizations: In order to present users with a set of APIs that are simple enough even for novices massive operational details are hidden. Larger organizations (especially those running their own datacenters) already have an operational competency, so the PaaS abstraction is just too simple.
2. Still too many vendors: Heroku pioneered the concept of "add -ons" and since then every PaaS company has been quick on their heels to copy that model. This leaves their customers paying too much to too many vendors with little-to-no visibility behind the scenes.

We saw these problems two years ago in the early days of Nodejitsu and set out to make OpsMezzo a complete solution built entirely on a single platform: Node.js + CouchDB.

Keep reading to learn more about how OpsMezzo can streamline and simplify your devops workflow. Or if you're interested in trying out OpsMezzo in your organization send an email to sales@nodejitsu to get a free evaluation!

On March 6th - March 8th, Nodejitsu experienced our worst service disruption to date. Following this series of outages, we immediately reallocated our Engineering and DevOps resources so as to properly assess the damage done and to fix some of our core infrastructure to ensure it never happens again.

In the time in between our outage and today we have overhauled our entire load balancing architecture, also known as Conductor. Below is a detailed look at our old load balancing system and our newly implemented solution.

Hi, earthlings! I'm Nathan Zadoks. I live in the Netherlands, not far from Amsterdam. I'm a self-taught programmer and electronics and chemistry enthusiast. I build small things and put them together. Functions. Programs. Objects.

From a young age, I've been fascinated with making systems do what I want. I fiddled with electronics and I learnt to program at age 7. I left VB for Perl, Perl for Python. I taught myself Linux, discovered the UNIX philosophy of simple, composable parts forming a powerful whole. I found node.js two years ago and loved how working with streams and composing small things was so very natural. Unfortunately, node wasn't as mature and thus I stuck with Python. About half a year ago I rediscovered node.js, the freedom of JavaScript and found the wealth of easily composable small modules in npm. This time, it stuck. (I do my best to help out with npm by triaging GitHub issues, patching small things and merging pull requests, occasionally frightening isaacs in the process.)

Over the course of Wednesday, March 6th through Friday, March 8th, Nodejitsu experienced its most serious service disruption to date. A significant number of users' applications were rendered intermittently unreachable due to load balancing and routing issues. Furthermore, a variety of circumstances combined that both increased the prevalence of the issues and prolonged the amount of time it took to reliably fix them. We consider the situation to have been completely unacceptable, and since then, the majority of our team has been working hard to ensure that it never happens again.

At this point, we'd like to take the time to explain what went wrong, and give some insight into some of the things we've been doing to make sure these issues don't repeat themselves.