This would have been pretty rad 10 years ago, when the world still cared about Solaris.
On a minor note: the post doesn't credit Oracle or Solaris, from where more than 90% of their SmartOS code comes from, until Oracle closed their code in 2010.
1) it's cheaper (theoretically, due to performance savings from not dealing with hardware virtualization), and 2) it looks like a docker host
I honestly expected Docker Hub to expand into this kind of operation before anyone else, but Joyent, from out of nowhere, has done it instead. Why should anybody care that they're doing it with a Solaris-based kernel, Linux, on NetBSD, as MAME machines, VIC-20 cartridges, or with 1402 machine images and druidic spells?
To the user, it's just a magical world where your Docker host always expands to whatever size you need it to (and you of course get a bill for the usage).
The real test will be whether or not this is cost-competitive to deploying Docker swarms on other public cloud providers. If the performance and tenancy claims are as they claim (or even the same order of magnitude, which seems reasonable), and they're not insanely greedy with pricing, this could be the biggest tech since Linux itself.
sdc-docker (the tech behind this, Triton) basically lets you just keep deploying containers without any regard for the actual underlying machines (or EC2 instances, DO droplets, Linodes) that you are actually deploying to. It's like docker-machine + docker-swarm but all automatic and managed by guys on the other side of the curtain, so you can just write the checks and keep the Docker goodness flowing.
Not sure I get this - Is this any different from mesos/kubernetes? If I am running this software and deploying my own datacenter someone stills need to provision the machines.
Yes, the data center operator needs to install the hardware compute nodes, but after that there's no additional step to provision anything else but the containers themselves.
I sorta feel like that gives him the right to credit or not credit Sun (and especially Oracle) as he sees fit.
If you think Solaris isn't still in development, just wait for the Solaris 12 announcement details.
I will keep an eye out for Solaris 12 though, but I probably won't be using it; I have enough closed-source OSes in my life already. :(
All of the technologies that illumos (and Solaris) is now known for (ZFS, Dtrace, crossbow, zones, RBAC, SMF, FMA) were developed by small teams of engineers taking charge. And nearly all of the developers of those technologies are now in the illumos community and notably not at Oracle.
Specifically, Dtrace is primarily the brain child of Bryan Cantrill of Joyent (co-developed with Adam Leventhal of Delphix and Mike Shapiro who left Oracle in 2010) and Jerry Jelinek of Joyent was one of the primary developers of Zones. Matt Ahrens and George Wilson, co-developers of ZFS along with Jeff Bohnwick, are now at Delphix with Adam. Though, as far as I know, Jeff is no longer involved with ZFS development.
All major features of Solaris 11 were developed in OpenSolaris. Solaris 11.1 major features are improvements to SMF, the installer, and the addition of ASLR. Major features in Solaris 11.2 are "kernel zones", OpenStack and SDN [1]. That's very little to show for five years of development.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system)
You also seem to be unaware that many of the "major features" you talk about in past releases were designed and implemented by people that are still working on Solaris today and sometimes in those same areas.
Also, I have no idea why you place kernel zones in quotes -- kernel zones was actually a massive project. Not a simple variation of existing zones technology. It provides true virtualisation of Solaris on Solaris with minimal overhead compared to alternatives.
Solaris has lots to show for five years of development if you understand the engineering effort required and even more is coming -- just wait until 11.3 and Solaris 12. You'll see things from Solaris you never expected. It's bit insulting to imply that bringing things like OpenStack to Solaris wasn't a significant effort. Many of these technologies are Linux-centric and required significant engineering effort from an architectural and technical perspective to provide an integrated solution.
Solaris also has interfaces and functionality that is not available in other Solaris-based distributions; especially in upcoming releases.
I didn't mean to imply that there aren't talented and smart engineers working on Solaris at Oracle. I am, however, underwhelmed by 11.1 and 11.2, which I see as a management problem, not an engineering one. But the point I was making is that when the illumos community talks about Dtrace, zones, ZFS, etc, you can't discount that and say "no, that was Sun" because the people who were the primary developers of those technologies are now with illumos. Saying that Bryan, Adam and Mike can't take credit for Dtrace is just silly.
I think that I can hold the following opinions simultaneously without contradiction:
- It's an impressive amount of technical work.
- It's not really an impressive technical work, per se: OpenStack already works well on Linux, whereas DTrace, zones, ZFS, etc. were and still are innovative. This makes them categorically different. (I definitely admit that my use of the phrase "still being developed" was definitely wrong, but I was replying in the context of the article and of SmartOS in general.)
- If Solaris were still free software, there may well be interest in porting OpenStack to Solaris from anyone other than Solaris engineering. Which, unfortunately, means I'm less inclined to take the hiring rampup positively: I now wonder how much of that work could have been done in the community.
- It's cool for your customers that you're doing this. (I admit I don't understand why someone would be a Solaris customer for any use case other than running other Oracle software, but that's not really relevant; there are quite a few customers, whether or not I understand them.)
- It's not really relevant for people who aren't your customers. Even keeping Solaris closed-source, it's still possible to deliver innovative features. OpenStack isn't one.
This may be less true for other features, but it's why I look at Solaris' current marketing, which is heavily touting OpenStack, and it doesn't cause me to be impressed with Solaris' pace of innovation.
I'm having trouble figuring out what kernel zones are. (Which might be part of the reason that it's not getting the respect it may deserve in general, or why 'bahamat put it in quotation marks, in specific.) It sounds like... KVM or lguest (both using virtio), but plugged into the zone framework and management tools? If so, then again it'd be certainly an impressive amount of work, but less-than-impressive work, compared to Solaris' past glory (DTrace, zones, ZFS, etc., none of which had even remotely comparable features on other OSes for quite a while after their invention by the Solaris team). And since SmartOS has had KVM anyway since its inception, I'm curious how kernel zones in fact stack up.
To be fair, I also work in enterprise software and specifically in systems/OS stuff, and I spend a good chunk of my time doing hard, low-level systems work that's cool for my customers, not really relevant to anyone else, and very rarely innovative in a global sense. I'm reasonably happy with what I do, but I'm also okay with the fact that nobody outside my management or our press releases will ever call 90+% of my work innovative, even though I put a lot of high-quality work into our product. A lot of enterprise software work is making a great product for people who aren't using a different, also-great product because of unrelated reasons. It's an honest and fun way to make a living, but we shouldn't call it more than it is.
At that point, why credit Oracle instead of Sun? Oracle finalized their deal to buy Sun in January 2010. How much did Oracle contribute between then and the announcement that they were closing their code?
Edit: Oracle announced closing OpenSolaris on August 13, 2010. The last "release" of OpenSolaris was June 2009.
But your point stands well. Oracle only had a paltry 7-8 months of contributions.
In my opinion, and I really don't know who would share this view, since Sun opened Solaris, illumos is now what Solaris was intended to be; it's not the illumos community that forked Solaris, it was Oracle.