In your opinion, which cloud providers are the most trustworthy? I see you comment about AWS being trustworthy, how do you feel about Azure, Rackspace Cloud, etc?
@bcantrill is the SVP of Engineering at Joyent. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I'm guessing he would say that Joyent is trustworthy. He would then tell you to use DTrace.
Ha! So, I guess my disclaimers have been made for me. ;)
In terms of trust, I would tell you that trust needs to be earned -- and that it can only be earned one day at a time and that it can be frivolously spent away with a single bad decision. (Trust me that Joyent has learned this the very, very hard way.) So I would say that you should force anyone to earn your trust. That infrastructure is such a trust business is part of why I so fervently believe in open source as a business strategy[1]; companies can change (or be bought) and earned trust violated by a new regime -- but open source can always be forked and its communities liberated from such abrogations.[2]
So while I would (of course!) tell you that Joyent is worthy of your trust (and ask for the opportunity to earn it), I would at the same time say that the open source projects we lead (SmartOS, node.js and -- yes -- DTrace) are the components in which you can have absolute faith.
Really appreciate the open source software, but I recently had some trust issues with Joyent the service. Cloud servers switched from tiered transfer rates (with a generous free tier) to on-demand pricing, with only a month of notice. It wasn't possible to monitor one's own bandwidth usage before the switch, so we were caught off guard by our bill jumping by nearly 30%. It would have been more trustworthy to grandfather in servers started under the old pricing plan.
I hear you -- and trust me, this kind of stuff is awful because even when you're actually trying hard to not screw anyone, you still accidentally screw someone. In terms of this in particular: we did really try to roll this out without abrupt notice or unpleasant surprises, so I'm sorry to hear that we missed the mark with you. If it was more than just annoyance, feel free to reach out to me directly (my first name -- spelled correctly -- at joyent.com) and I'll try to right the ship.
Again, my apologies -- and to my point, trust is very hard to earn, and very easy (too easy) to piss away. :(
