My name is Rod Boothby. I head up the Evangelism team at Joyent.
It's true that some of our user interface stuff needs improving. We are planning on delivering some powerful solutions in the near future.
Over the past year, we have been focusing on helping clients deploy truly massive sites. The largest Ruby on Rails application in the world runs on Joyent.
http://www.joyent.com/a/scale-rails-to-1-billion-pageviews
Joyent has helped clients like ABC, CNN, Disney, Boston.com, and Gilt.com to deploy and scale sites that deliver Billions of page views a month.
For example, we have a Drupal site running on Joyent that can support 2.5 Billion page views a month.
Over the last month, we have delivered to clients solutions that you simply can not get from some of our competitors mentions below..
#1 Joyent VPN Cloud - a secure cloud deployment that is segregated at the switch level. This delivers the PCI compliance required by large sites.
#2 Joyent's Virtual Data Center software - we will be announcing more in the next few weeks, but the first instance of this product was delivered to a client in Japan in December '08. Even with virtualization solutions like XEN or VMWare, most data centers can only achieve 8% to 12% utilization. Joyent's Virtual Data Center software can help large data centers to achieve up to 80% utilization.
#3 Joyent Cloud as a Service API. For an example, check out what Aptana has down with Joyent's API: http://www.aptana.com/cloud
The stuff coming down the pipe is also really interesting.
The first includes a new tool that lets you fully instrument a production application and get true performance analytics designed to help you identify bottle necks and you to true Application Performance Level agreements.
The second is a new web based interface that lets you manage complex cloud deployments.
If you have questions, our would like to learn more, please feel free to ping me directly. ( rod at joyent ).