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> When SmartOS or generally Solaris-descendants' zones start being anywhere near popular, then we'll talk about eating Linux's lunch. For now the situation does

by Annatar 11y ago

> When SmartOS or generally Solaris-descendants' zones start being anywhere near popular, then we'll talk about eating Linux's lunch. For now the situation doesn't look like that even remotely. By eating Linux's lunch I meant how good, reliable and capable the zones and lx-branded zones technology is. It is very reliable and very capable. It works very well while Linux is still trying to find itself within the cloud container paradigm: look at how many competing solutions there are on Linux in that space, and every single one of them exists because the other one lacked something, or did not do it in a satisfctory way. That is what I meant by everybody's flapping on Linux with containers. Meanwhile, there are no such issues or problems in the illumos and SmartOS communities: the tech used there has been designed from the ground up to be secure and work for large enterprises, and unlike the Linux cloud technology, it has been in heavy use for ten years now. illumos and SmartOS are not trying to still find themsselves, because zones, ZFS, and Crossbow network virtualization already worked for years. Back in 2006 for instance, at a place where I worked, we were already packing eight Oracle databases per 32 GB RAM system, in production. Now it's 2016, and zones have only gotten better with the addition of KVM and Crossbow network virtualization. > But there is the factor of familiarity, which is very, very important. There are plenty of sysadmins, you know, who can recover Linux from almost any failure, and gaining similar knowledge in different OS takes quite long time. Solaris derivatives (or BSDs, for that matter) are at huge disadvantage to those people. As for those people, they had to learn Linux too; they can go back to the roots and learn a real UNIX the correct way now, and be glad that they have the opportunity to do so. If one truly knows UNIX, one understands Linux on a much deeper level.

dozzie 11y ago
> By eating Linux's lunch I meant how good, reliable and capable the zones and lx-branded zones technology is. Could you then use idioms in their proper meaning, please? Because I only protested against claim that zones have taken a market share of Linux containers, which is very untrue, and at the same time not the claim you have made. > As for those people, they had to learn Linux too; they can go back to the roots and learn a real UNIX the correct way now, and be glad that they have the opportunity to do so. So, zones provide better platform because people can go back and learn Solaris? Or what? Zones need to provide something tangible over containers for people to invest in learning different platform. Having just another tool, which merely does what one already can do with containers, only slightly slicker, but severly limited in applicability because parent platform is not familiar to all the colleagues, doesn't look like a good trade. And note that we were only talking about familiarity. There are still other reasons, like little developers working on a given Solaris derivative, which doesn't give much confidence that any bugs that occur would be fixed, or a concern that the supported hardware list will be long enough.
- Annatar 11y ago
  > Could you then use idioms in their proper meaning, please? eat lunch eat someone's lunch Sl. to best someone; to defeat, outwit, or win against someone. http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/eat+lunch http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/eat+lunch ...It can refer to market share like you argue, but in a broader sense, this is at least how I understood the term eating someone's lunch. > So, zones provide better platform because people can go back and learn Solaris? Or what? No, Solaris (well, illumos, since nobody cares about Solaris any more) provides a better platform for learning and understanding UNIX. And with that comes the insight of writing better code in general, especially on Linux. For example, one is able to write completely portable shell code and deliver cleanly packaged software on Linux if one understands UNIX (in /opt, /etc/opt/, and /var/opt instead of /usr[/local] -- and that is just one trivial example). zones are a fully working solution because they provide full security isolation, while running as regular processes with their own init(1M), instead of being forced to run Docker inside of KVM or XEN virtual machines to achieve that. And because processes inside of zones are just regular processes in the global zone, they only use as much resources as they need, and no more. With zones, one does not have to hard partition and preallocate memory and CPU to achieve full isolation, as is very often the case with running Docker inside of a virtual machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T2XFSALOaU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T2XFSALOaU And because zones' storage is backed by ZFS, the data is guaranteed end-to-end integrity, and self-healing if the zpool is redundant (RAID1+0, RAIDZ, RAIDZ2). Writing filesystems is hard: https://danluu.com/file-consistency/ https://danluu.com/file-consistency/ For its part, illumos is the reference system as it is fully POSIX, XPG4, and SUS / UNIX03 compliant, so learning it means learning and mastering the standards. And, once spoiled by all the nice features in illumos / SmartOS, going back to Linux feels like going back to skins and stone knives.
  - dozzie 11y ago
    > Sl. to best someone; to defeat, outwit, or win against someone. > ...It can refer to market share like you argue, but in a broader sense, this is at least how I understood the term eating someone's lunch. It's still a far stretch to claim that zones win against containers. They could if we limited the field to just technical level, and then again, I would need to see some arguments why they actually are better. >> So, zones provide better platform because people can go back and learn Solaris? Or what? > No, Solaris [...] provides a better platform for learning and understanding UNIX. You're confusing here learning unix with using it. If one was at the stage of learning, Solaris could be fine, except there's much less material about it for newbies (especially about rough corners and stupid troubles, like "I ran `chmod -R 777 /'" or "I deleted my kernel"), and much, much less knowledgable people accessible to those newbies to learn from. Now look at professional Linux sysadmins and programmers. They already have some knowledge about their OS and they're not likely to do a hard turn for different OS just for the sake of "understanding UNIX", as it would require quite large effort to just get to the point where they are already with Linux. Solaris would need to provide a really compelling function or feature to justify this effort, and all you said is "portability" (which most probably won't be necessary in most cases) and vague notion of "understanding UNIX". EDIT: It was a little dishonest on my side to suggest that main selling points of Solaris derivatives were "understanding UNIX" and "writing portabile code". Solaris introduced ZFS and DTrace. But while it is said that ZFS with zones work well together, it still needs explaining why is it a significantly better combination than what Linux provides, and DTrace seems like a very distant benefit, less compelling each time a tool like Sysdig shows up.

by Annatar 11y ago

dozzie 11y ago

> By eating Linux's lunch I meant how good, reliable and capable the zones and lx-branded zones technology is. Could you then use idioms in their proper meaning, please? Because I only protested against claim that zones have taken a market share of Linux containers, which is very untrue, and at the same time not the claim you have made. > As for those people, they had to learn Linux too; they can go back to the roots and learn a real UNIX the correct way now, and be glad that they have the opportunity to do so. So, zones provide better platform because people can go back and learn Solaris? Or what? Zones need to provide something tangible over containers for people to invest in learning different platform. Having just another tool, which merely does what one already can do with containers, only slightly slicker, but severly limited in applicability because parent platform is not familiar to all the colleagues, doesn't look like a good trade. And note that we were only talking about familiarity. There are still other reasons, like little developers working on a given Solaris derivative, which doesn't give much confidence that any bugs that occur would be fixed, or a concern that the supported hardware list will be long enough.

Annatar 11y ago
> Could you then use idioms in their proper meaning, please? eat lunch eat someone's lunch Sl. to best someone; to defeat, outwit, or win against someone. http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/eat+lunch http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/eat+lunch ...It can refer to market share like you argue, but in a broader sense, this is at least how I understood the term eating someone's lunch. > So, zones provide better platform because people can go back and learn Solaris? Or what? No, Solaris (well, illumos, since nobody cares about Solaris any more) provides a better platform for learning and understanding UNIX. And with that comes the insight of writing better code in general, especially on Linux. For example, one is able to write completely portable shell code and deliver cleanly packaged software on Linux if one understands UNIX (in /opt, /etc/opt/, and /var/opt instead of /usr[/local] -- and that is just one trivial example). zones are a fully working solution because they provide full security isolation, while running as regular processes with their own init(1M), instead of being forced to run Docker inside of KVM or XEN virtual machines to achieve that. And because processes inside of zones are just regular processes in the global zone, they only use as much resources as they need, and no more. With zones, one does not have to hard partition and preallocate memory and CPU to achieve full isolation, as is very often the case with running Docker inside of a virtual machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T2XFSALOaU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T2XFSALOaU And because zones' storage is backed by ZFS, the data is guaranteed end-to-end integrity, and self-healing if the zpool is redundant (RAID1+0, RAIDZ, RAIDZ2). Writing filesystems is hard: https://danluu.com/file-consistency/ https://danluu.com/file-consistency/ For its part, illumos is the reference system as it is fully POSIX, XPG4, and SUS / UNIX03 compliant, so learning it means learning and mastering the standards. And, once spoiled by all the nice features in illumos / SmartOS, going back to Linux feels like going back to skins and stone knives.
- dozzie 11y ago
  > Sl. to best someone; to defeat, outwit, or win against someone. > ...It can refer to market share like you argue, but in a broader sense, this is at least how I understood the term eating someone's lunch. It's still a far stretch to claim that zones win against containers. They could if we limited the field to just technical level, and then again, I would need to see some arguments why they actually are better. >> So, zones provide better platform because people can go back and learn Solaris? Or what? > No, Solaris [...] provides a better platform for learning and understanding UNIX. You're confusing here learning unix with using it. If one was at the stage of learning, Solaris could be fine, except there's much less material about it for newbies (especially about rough corners and stupid troubles, like "I ran `chmod -R 777 /'" or "I deleted my kernel"), and much, much less knowledgable people accessible to those newbies to learn from. Now look at professional Linux sysadmins and programmers. They already have some knowledge about their OS and they're not likely to do a hard turn for different OS just for the sake of "understanding UNIX", as it would require quite large effort to just get to the point where they are already with Linux. Solaris would need to provide a really compelling function or feature to justify this effort, and all you said is "portability" (which most probably won't be necessary in most cases) and vague notion of "understanding UNIX". EDIT: It was a little dishonest on my side to suggest that main selling points of Solaris derivatives were "understanding UNIX" and "writing portabile code". Solaris introduced ZFS and DTrace. But while it is said that ZFS with zones work well together, it still needs explaining why is it a significantly better combination than what Linux provides, and DTrace seems like a very distant benefit, less compelling each time a tool like Sysdig shows up.