Hi everyone. Long time lurker, first time poster.
A few friends and I are consultants, programmers, network and system administrators in the United States and operate under the brand Crop Circle Systems, Inc.
http://ccsys.comI'm a proponent of FreeBSD (mostly) as well as NetBSD, OpenBSD, Gentoo Linux and the Genode OS Framework.
We develop system administration solutions around FreeBSD, ZFS, DTrace and VirtualBox.
We develop networking solutions around NetBSD and OpenBSD.
We release a [currently] FreeBSD 9.2 based distro called nuOS. It is quite vanilla FreeBSD with whip cream and a cherry on top.
We don't take anything away or impose our way of doing things if you already like FreeBSD the way it is. Advanced users can enjoy our a la carte features while users less experienced with FreeBSD will be guided effectively without being mesmerized by "black magic". If you looked at FreeBSD before and found it daunting or too much work to deploy using its modern features we might help you fall in love with your OS all over again.
http://nuos.org https://github.com/CropCircleSys/nuOSWe develop applications around HTML5, AngularJS, Node.js, Erlang, Redis and MongoDB among other favorites like PostgreSQL. Upon those we are building a full-stack application framework currently called BreakNeck (working title) vertically integrated all the way from your users' tantalized senses on down through the system framework we've built with nuOS. Your native apps are welcomed to tie in replacing HTML5 and AngularJS while sharing everything below, though if you come to us for that, we currently outsource Mac OS X, MS Windows, iOS and Android development (and are always interested in connecting with more of those developers). I'm honing my chops with Qt5 as of late as well but I'm not a pro with it yet.
We are working on a platform as a service for [self-]managed hosting called CargoBay.
https://cargobay.netThe difference with CargoBay is, because the entire nuOS and BreakNeck platforms (minus multitenancy and billing) are available as open source for your use at your own shop, it's made completely hassle-free to migrate in either direction. Hybrid deployments will also be a breeze and seamless. (That's what we tell investors at least.)
Seriously though, that should be relatively painless for you to engineer your own hybrid solutions specific to your needs with our tools and services. As you grow or change your mind about configuration you should not be made to rue the earlier decisions you've made and extorted for them. nuOS's features make experimentation fun again and BreakNeck's features will take the guesswork out of production-ready web-scale stable hardened implementations and deployments.
We hear a lot of clients of Crop Circle Systems' complain that "cloud" service/platform/hosting providers seem to try and lock you in, more so the easier they try to be to use/manage. The "addiction" factor rather than the satisfaction factor is not a good way to do business, in our opinions. We could be wrong but I think our approach will have more long term sustainability for our customer, ourselves and the relationship between us. We don't concede that ease-of-use must sacrifice control, capability or options.
The idea with CargoBay is it's so easy to leave, and effectively welcoming to work under the hood with your own tools or ours, that you'll decide to stay or recommend it to others even if you were to outgrow us (to a nuOS/BreakNeck deployment in-house or at one of our 800-lb-gorilla
competitors strategic partners). Our platform is engineered to play well with others. (We have to, being a pygmy marmoset, to complete the analogy.
) Hopefully we grow to fulfill the vast majority of our customers' needs.
Whether you are interested in services or informing us of your availability and skill-set in order to network and partner, consider reaching out to us through our profile here or our web sites. We are based in downtown Tampa, Florida and just ramping up currently. Early adopters will be rewarded with our starving-artist pricing and have their development/deployment needs catered to early.