Jumping Ship to JumpBox

In two weeks I'll be walking away from my role with Apriva to join friends and former co-workers at JumpBox. Why would I leave a cushy job at which I do mindlessly simple work and leap head-first into the seemingly unending tempest that is a startup? The simple answer is that I'd prefer to be challenged and happy rather than bored and miserable. Some people thrive in startup environments while others are wholly consumed by them. I fall into the former group.

The more complex answer is that, for quite a while now, I've believed that one of the major problems in computing is its gross inefficiency. Data centers full of servers each exposing different facilities and operating at about 90% idle is an incredible waste of space, energy, time, and resources. Furthermore, the thousands of clients connecting to those servers are almost guaranteed to be operating at 90% idle as well, thus compounding the problem of wasted CPU cycles.

The answer to the server-side dilemma, as is becoming increasingly more obvious, is virtualization. The guys at JumpBox have understood this for a while, and instead of embarking on the route of providing a virtualization platform, they've instead sought to provide a comprehensive set of virtualized appliances. They do the busywork of installing and configuring solutions for you, providing them as portable virtual machine images that you need only double-click to launch. Anyone who's ever installed and configured Trac or MovableType will understand the inherent value of this service.

That said, there's more to solving the overall inefficiency problem than simply virtualizing the server side of the computing process, and it is my hope that my joining JumpBox will in some way assist in identifying and developing solutions.

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