7 ms·

Farewell, Solaris

113 points by francesca 9y ago

cyphar 9y ago
> The future of Oracle Solaris, perhaps the one true Solaris if you had to pick one, is murky at best. I believe the article linked talking about "the death of Oracle Solaris" was shown to be FUD and over-zealous reporting, but ignoring that I don't see why you would think Oracle no-longer-open-Solaris would be the "one true Solaris if you had to pick one". illumos gained the majority of the development community from Oracle after the majority of the Solaris developers left, and most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos.
- patrickg_zill 9y ago
  Actually DTrace, Zones, ZFS all predate the Oracle acquisition of Sun.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - cyphar 9y ago
    > and most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos. My use of "Solaris's core technologies" implies that I'm referring to technologies that already existed. Yes, I am aware that ZFS, DTrace and Zones all happened long before the Oracle acquisition.
- spankweasel 9y ago
  > ... most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos. As a core Solaris dev at Oracle, I can tell you that's not true. I just can't prove it to you. :-(
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    Isn't there anything notable you could talk about that has already been released?
    - spankweasel 9y ago
      I'm not terribly familiar with the ZFS/DTrace side of things but Solaris 11.2 added Kernel Zones [1] and Solaris 11.3 added more features [2]. We have Unified Archives as a way to create either a golden image of a system (all configuration and other host-specific data) or a "clone" image (the software payload minus host-specific data) which can be used to install metal, LDOMs, kernel zones, or branded zones and allow P2P, V2V, P2V, or V2P. [3] We've had Boot Environments since 11.0 [4] which allows me infinite flexibility to upgrade or even try out random things. If things go south, I can roll back to a safe BE in 30 seconds with no issue. [1] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E37629/gnzfn.html http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E37629/gnzfn.html [2] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54847/virt.html#scrolltoc http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54847/virt.html#sc... [3] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E38524/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E38524/index.html [4] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E21801/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E21801/index.html
      - patrickg_zill 9y ago
        Unified archives sound like an extension of flash archives, available since Solaris 9. Boot environments showed up in the post Solaris 10 open source effort, again, pre Oracle...
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        mgerdts 9y ago
        FWIW, I am a Solaris developer on the zones team and was part of the project team that implemented unified archives. I joined the Solaris org about a year before Solaris 11 shipped and was a Solaris admin for a long while before that. Here's my take. Flash archives were available long before Solaris 9 - I think it was Solaris 7. In the Solaris 2.5.1 days I invented something similar for use in in the academic labs I managed. Boot environments were introduced with Live Upgrade which also was available at least as far back as Solaris 8. Lessons were learned. With Live Upgrade, the admin had to plan ahead to ensure that spare disks or slices were available to create an alternate BE. Most admins didn't have the foresight. Then when it came time to patch or install/remove software, the pre/post install scripts often had broken logic that caused changes to happen in the wrong place (or not happen at all). Live Upgrade came long before zones and was an extremely poor fit. Live Upgrade came out of an org other than the Solaris org, and the lack of coordination was quite evident. Flash archives seem to have a design point of installing one system to look exactly like others. Installing an Ultra 5 from a flash archive created from an Ultra 10 was considered going off the rails. In reality, this worked most of the time. When I used flash archives extensively, I would tend to create them on 15k or 25k domain and use them on all systems. Again, flash archives were conceived long before zones and integrated poorly with them. The release of Solaris 11 integrated lots of stuff that was previously cobbled together. ZFS is the only supported root file system and zones also live on ZFS. Boot environments are required on the global zone and in zones. There were rules as to where the zonepath could be, making it possible to always come to a correct solution as to how to create a new zone boot environment that corresponds with the global zone boot environment. This foundation works nice with the packaging system, IPS. IPS determines whether you are changing files that will require a reboot. If so, it creates a new boot environment via zfs clones and updates the new boot environment. When you are ready, you can reboot into the new boot environment. By choosing defaults, you get the best practice. The system actively prevents you from doing things that will cause support to say "back up, repartition, and restore." That's a big improvement. Unified archives build on lessons leared from flash archives. Flash archives were really only intended for system cloning, but the archive contained the configuration from the master system. Unconfiguration happened as part of deployment, not as part of archiving. Unified archives integrate with the packaging system to revert various amounts of configuration (in a temporary boot environment) so that the archive is optionally unconfigured and always ready to be moved to a new virtual or physical platform. Transforms between zones and global zones are explicitly supported. Want to convert your ldom/zone/kernel zone/whatever to a whatever/ldom/kernel zone/zone? That's supported. Unified archives come in clone and recovery variants. A recovery archive is suitable for bare-metal restore and preserves all of the configuration (networking, name service config, etc.). A clone archive whacks all of that configuration and ensures that it is not part of the archive. Unified archives allow multiple virtual systems to be included in one archive. This means that you can type "archiveadm create myarchive.uar" and it will create an archive that has the global zone and all other zones, each of which is individually installable from the archive. Unified archives allow inclusion of multiple zpools in the archive. In contrast, flash archives only archived the root pool. The selection of which pools and/or datasets is possible via command line arguments. I've blogged about a bunch of this at https://blogs.oracle.com/zoneszone/ https://blogs.oracle.com/zoneszone/
- ajross 9y ago
  Illumos is not "Oracle Solaris" though. It seems clear to me that the statement was about the commercial product, which while it's not going away, is clearly on a path to join AIX and HP-UX as fundamentally legacy products sold into shrinking markets. As for illumos itself, meh. It's way behind even OpenBSD in adoption. Free software doesn't ever die, but I wouldn't expect it to carry much in the way of a Solaris torch.
symlinkk 9y ago
I wish they gave actual numbers on how few people were downloading Solaris builds.
- daenney 9y ago
  Me too. It's easy to say "it doesn't have the numbers" but without sharing those actual numbers and showing what portion they account for in the total it always leaves me wondering if it's truly as low as implied. That said, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that interest in Solaris releases is rather low and that maintaining support for it is probably costing them more than the returns.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  Our numbers aren't comparable to MongoDB, but when we dropped support for Solaris in Virtualmin a few years ago, we had a couple dozen active Solaris installations left (and we had maybe 75,000 active installations on Linux at that time), only a couple of which were paying customers. At its peak, it was never more than a few thousand Solaris installations (and most of those were because Joyent installed Virtualmin GPL on their containers, and they also used it for shared hosting on Solaris before that, by default, but when they shifted their business model those disappeared). I don't know anything about MongoDB usage, but I do know Solaris/Illumos is a tiny blip on the radar of usage in web dev and web hosting. We just don't hear about it at all. I think we still get Solaris bug reports and patches every now and then, like once or twice a year, for Webmin on Solaris (which is still supported in a "we won't intentionally break it" sort of way and Jamie still builds Solaris packages), but even that's very rare, and Webmin has a million or so installations. The biggest factor for me wasn't the raw number, it was simply that usage was shrinking rapidly. You can't reasonably devote a bunch of effort to maintaining support for an OS that has a small number of users today and will have half as many in a year. Software is a bet on returns with interest; I'm betting that putting in weeks of effort to support a new OS (or Linux distro, or platform, or web server, or language, or whatever) will keep paying for months or years. There's no way to count Solaris usage that I'm aware of that doesn't show it being smaller next year. That's unfortunate, perhaps; there's a lot of cool stuff in Solaris (and Illumos). But, market forces aren't sentimental and Linux is a juggernaut that rolls over everything in its path and consumes the best features (and some of the bad features too) of everything it touches. It's funny that the old wisdom of Microsoft being like the Borg and Linux being a scrappy upstart has kinda turned on its end. Linux now absorbs the best of other operating systems and just keeps multiplying and spreading into more and more markets from mobile to big iron.
jcadam 9y ago
I'll admit to running Solaris on my desktop many years ago when it was still under Sun's stewardship. It was the most accessible 'real' UNIX for most people (being that it was free and able to run on x86). I also once had a job working on an old Ada codebase that had us stuck on SPARC/Solaris 8 (in the late 2000s :O). It makes me sad to see what Oracle has done to it. In any case, I suspect most users looking for a more 'authentic' UNIX flavor than Linux have shifted over to *BSD (My home file server runs FreeBSD -- mostly for the ZFS support -- hey, at least a file system from Solaris-land will live on).
- errantmind 9y ago
  I also ran FreeBSD for ZFS for a while. I ended switching and using ZFS on Linux and haven't had any issues, aside from a pool migration bug which the maintainers fixed very quickly: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs
- busterarm 9y ago
  I have fond memories of Solaris, but I'm pretty much on OpenBSD for good these days. It's really head-and-shoulders above anything else available these days, IMO. The closest alternative that I'd find acceptable might be Arch, but gosh, systemd is one of those things that just make me hate running systems.
  - stutonk 9y ago
    You should have a look at Void Linux[1] (if you ever wanted to give Linux another shot). It uses runit for init instead of systemd and offers musl as an actively supported alternative to glibc. Its package manager is similar to the one in Arch in that it provides both rolling-release binary packages as well as a ports-style build system. Void also incorporates OpenBSD's LibreSSL by default. Everything else is kept as minimal and simple as possible. 1) https://www.voidlinux.eu/ https://www.voidlinux.eu/
    - 5ilv3r 9y ago
      Downloading. :) Thanks.
hyperrail 9y ago
What happens when security vulnerabilities are patched in a supported version of MongoDB? Will Solaris users simply never get those patches? The blog doesn't say that I could see.
- jlgaddis 9y ago
  > Existing release artifacts for Solaris will continue to be made available, but no new releases will be issued, barring a critical issue raised under an existing support contract covering MongoDB versions 3.0 through 3.4 running on Solaris. Sounds like those with a support contract can get a patch/update. I suppose everyone else is SOL.
  - angus-prune 9y ago
    I read that as that they'll only work on issues raised under support contract, but would release the fixes to everyone.
    - metheus 9y ago
      See Aly's top-level comment re: patches and download numbers.
cpeterso 9y ago
It's ironic that ecosystem fragmentation is now a legitimate reason to drop Solaris when fragmentation had for a long time been a major concern for supporting Linux.
redm 9y ago
I have a lot of nostalgia for Solaris and Irix circa 2000. They had their uses and places, especially when coupled with SGI and Sun hardware. I think mostly the reason its nostalgic is that it reminds me of a "golden age" (late 1970's to mid-1990's?) of accessible computing when computers were still the domain of nerds.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Me too, because Solaris, Irix and NeXTSTEP were the only UNIXes that had attempts to be something better than just XWIndows on top of POSIX.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
alyson-cabral 9y ago
I'm one of the Product Managers at MongoDB and I was a part of making this decision. It seems like there are two main areas where people are asking for more information: 1) exactly what are the numbers of Solaris downloads and 2) what about security patches of existing versions? I'm happy to clarify those points here and we will be posting an update to the blog to include this information. Based on the data we have, about 0.06% (and decreasing) of MongoDB users are running on Solaris. In addition, as Andrew mentioned in the blog, all of our customers have either deprecated Solaris or have told us they plan to deprecate it. In regards to security patches on Solaris, we will continue to fix critical flaws for the community, regardless of where found or how reported. Anyone can report a security vulnerability by using our Security project (https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SECURITY https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SECURITY) to create an account then a ticket describing the vulnerability.
- SoMisanthrope 9y ago
  It was the right decision, @alyson-cabral. The major market is linux-based, correct? There are better uses of company assets, than trying to chase the less-than-0.06% of holdouts that operate Solaris. As a person of science, I've used both Sun Solaris and SGI Irix.... time to let go of that past and pivot to the future!
  - SoMisanthrope 9y ago
    Not sure why my relating my direct experience, respectfully... got me modded down. There are some really strange people with high karma scores. LOL What a joke.
  - unethical_ban 9y ago
    You're shadowbanned.
bogomipz 9y ago
Interesting that one of the reasons for their dropping Solaris support is "Operational difficulties." The same would also be valid reason for saying "Farewell" to Mongodb. Anyone that's had to manage a MongoDB database could tell you about regularly having to manually re-synch their secondaries, manually having to run compactions to manage disk space(the power of 2 allocator), the automatic "balancer" process that sends I/O the roof, the rollback files etc. I think MongoDB being so operationally difficult is the prime reason that MongoDB offers a managed MongoDB PaaS offering.
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  Isn't every similar database a pain to support?
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    What databases are similar to MongoDB either architecturally, storage engine or data model?
kev009 9y ago
Anyone smart enough to use SmartOS is not dumb enough to use MongoDB so nothing was lost.
jsiepkes 9y ago
Meanwhile in the comment section of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15124306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15124306 HackerNews MongoDB article basically everyone (who speaks up at least) seems to agree that the drawbacks of NoSQL outweigh the benefits.
rodgerd 9y ago
Unsurprising. As far as I can see Solaris is pretty much retreating into being in the same position as zOS (MVS): something Oracle ship with the integrated hardware stacks.
pharaohgeek 9y ago
Solaris has, historically, been my favorite operating system. I started using it when Sun made Solaris 7 available for free to anyone who requested it when I was in college. I still remember receiving a package in the mail with a nice set of packaged CDs and documentation! My college had standardized on Unix for development for homework assignments, and Linux at the time still seemed "immature" to me. I loved the stability and sanity I found with Solaris, and even saved up money to beef up my home PC so that it could run better (SCSI hard drives, more RAM, etc.) I used it up through version 10, but once Oracle took control and de-open-sourced it, I knew that was the beginning of the end.

113 points by francesca 9y ago

> The future of Oracle Solaris, perhaps the one true Solaris if you had to pick one, is murky at best. I believe the article linked talking about "the death of Oracle Solaris" was shown to be FUD and over-zealous reporting, but ignoring that I don't see why you would think Oracle no-longer-open-Solaris would be the "one true Solaris if you had to pick one". illumos gained the majority of the development community from Oracle after the majority of the Solaris developers left, and most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos.

patrickg_zill 9y ago
Actually DTrace, Zones, ZFS all predate the Oracle acquisition of Sun.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- cyphar 9y ago
  > and most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos. My use of "Solaris's core technologies" implies that I'm referring to technologies that already existed. Yes, I am aware that ZFS, DTrace and Zones all happened long before the Oracle acquisition.
spankweasel 9y ago
> ... most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos. As a core Solaris dev at Oracle, I can tell you that's not true. I just can't prove it to you. :-(
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  Isn't there anything notable you could talk about that has already been released?
  - spankweasel 9y ago
    I'm not terribly familiar with the ZFS/DTrace side of things but Solaris 11.2 added Kernel Zones [1] and Solaris 11.3 added more features [2]. We have Unified Archives as a way to create either a golden image of a system (all configuration and other host-specific data) or a "clone" image (the software payload minus host-specific data) which can be used to install metal, LDOMs, kernel zones, or branded zones and allow P2P, V2V, P2V, or V2P. [3] We've had Boot Environments since 11.0 [4] which allows me infinite flexibility to upgrade or even try out random things. If things go south, I can roll back to a safe BE in 30 seconds with no issue. [1] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E37629/gnzfn.html http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E37629/gnzfn.html [2] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54847/virt.html#scrolltoc http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53394_01/html/E54847/virt.html#sc... [3] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E38524/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E38524/index.html [4] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E21801/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/E21801/index.html
    - patrickg_zill 9y ago
      Unified archives sound like an extension of flash archives, available since Solaris 9. Boot environments showed up in the post Solaris 10 open source effort, again, pre Oracle...
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - mgerdts 9y ago
        FWIW, I am a Solaris developer on the zones team and was part of the project team that implemented unified archives. I joined the Solaris org about a year before Solaris 11 shipped and was a Solaris admin for a long while before that. Here's my take. Flash archives were available long before Solaris 9 - I think it was Solaris 7. In the Solaris 2.5.1 days I invented something similar for use in in the academic labs I managed. Boot environments were introduced with Live Upgrade which also was available at least as far back as Solaris 8. Lessons were learned. With Live Upgrade, the admin had to plan ahead to ensure that spare disks or slices were available to create an alternate BE. Most admins didn't have the foresight. Then when it came time to patch or install/remove software, the pre/post install scripts often had broken logic that caused changes to happen in the wrong place (or not happen at all). Live Upgrade came long before zones and was an extremely poor fit. Live Upgrade came out of an org other than the Solaris org, and the lack of coordination was quite evident. Flash archives seem to have a design point of installing one system to look exactly like others. Installing an Ultra 5 from a flash archive created from an Ultra 10 was considered going off the rails. In reality, this worked most of the time. When I used flash archives extensively, I would tend to create them on 15k or 25k domain and use them on all systems. Again, flash archives were conceived long before zones and integrated poorly with them. The release of Solaris 11 integrated lots of stuff that was previously cobbled together. ZFS is the only supported root file system and zones also live on ZFS. Boot environments are required on the global zone and in zones. There were rules as to where the zonepath could be, making it possible to always come to a correct solution as to how to create a new zone boot environment that corresponds with the global zone boot environment. This foundation works nice with the packaging system, IPS. IPS determines whether you are changing files that will require a reboot. If so, it creates a new boot environment via zfs clones and updates the new boot environment. When you are ready, you can reboot into the new boot environment. By choosing defaults, you get the best practice. The system actively prevents you from doing things that will cause support to say "back up, repartition, and restore." That's a big improvement. Unified archives build on lessons leared from flash archives. Flash archives were really only intended for system cloning, but the archive contained the configuration from the master system. Unconfiguration happened as part of deployment, not as part of archiving. Unified archives integrate with the packaging system to revert various amounts of configuration (in a temporary boot environment) so that the archive is optionally unconfigured and always ready to be moved to a new virtual or physical platform. Transforms between zones and global zones are explicitly supported. Want to convert your ldom/zone/kernel zone/whatever to a whatever/ldom/kernel zone/zone? That's supported. Unified archives come in clone and recovery variants. A recovery archive is suitable for bare-metal restore and preserves all of the configuration (networking, name service config, etc.). A clone archive whacks all of that configuration and ensures that it is not part of the archive. Unified archives allow multiple virtual systems to be included in one archive. This means that you can type "archiveadm create myarchive.uar" and it will create an archive that has the global zone and all other zones, each of which is individually installable from the archive. Unified archives allow inclusion of multiple zpools in the archive. In contrast, flash archives only archived the root pool. The selection of which pools and/or datasets is possible via command line arguments. I've blogged about a bunch of this at https://blogs.oracle.com/zoneszone/ https://blogs.oracle.com/zoneszone/
ajross 9y ago
Illumos is not "Oracle Solaris" though. It seems clear to me that the statement was about the commercial product, which while it's not going away, is clearly on a path to join AIX and HP-UX as fundamentally legacy products sold into shrinking markets. As for illumos itself, meh. It's way behind even OpenBSD in adoption. Free software doesn't ever die, but I wouldn't expect it to carry much in the way of a Solaris torch.

symlinkk 9y ago

I wish they gave actual numbers on how few people were downloading Solaris builds.

daenney 9y ago
Me too. It's easy to say "it doesn't have the numbers" but without sharing those actual numbers and showing what portion they account for in the total it always leaves me wondering if it's truly as low as implied. That said, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that interest in Solaris releases is rather low and that maintaining support for it is probably costing them more than the returns.
SwellJoe 9y ago
Our numbers aren't comparable to MongoDB, but when we dropped support for Solaris in Virtualmin a few years ago, we had a couple dozen active Solaris installations left (and we had maybe 75,000 active installations on Linux at that time), only a couple of which were paying customers. At its peak, it was never more than a few thousand Solaris installations (and most of those were because Joyent installed Virtualmin GPL on their containers, and they also used it for shared hosting on Solaris before that, by default, but when they shifted their business model those disappeared). I don't know anything about MongoDB usage, but I do know Solaris/Illumos is a tiny blip on the radar of usage in web dev and web hosting. We just don't hear about it at all. I think we still get Solaris bug reports and patches every now and then, like once or twice a year, for Webmin on Solaris (which is still supported in a "we won't intentionally break it" sort of way and Jamie still builds Solaris packages), but even that's very rare, and Webmin has a million or so installations. The biggest factor for me wasn't the raw number, it was simply that usage was shrinking rapidly. You can't reasonably devote a bunch of effort to maintaining support for an OS that has a small number of users today and will have half as many in a year. Software is a bet on returns with interest; I'm betting that putting in weeks of effort to support a new OS (or Linux distro, or platform, or web server, or language, or whatever) will keep paying for months or years. There's no way to count Solaris usage that I'm aware of that doesn't show it being smaller next year. That's unfortunate, perhaps; there's a lot of cool stuff in Solaris (and Illumos). But, market forces aren't sentimental and Linux is a juggernaut that rolls over everything in its path and consumes the best features (and some of the bad features too) of everything it touches. It's funny that the old wisdom of Microsoft being like the Borg and Linux being a scrappy upstart has kinda turned on its end. Linux now absorbs the best of other operating systems and just keeps multiplying and spreading into more and more markets from mobile to big iron.

jcadam 9y ago

I'll admit to running Solaris on my desktop many years ago when it was still under Sun's stewardship. It was the most accessible 'real' UNIX for most people (being that it was free and able to run on x86). I also once had a job working on an old Ada codebase that had us stuck on SPARC/Solaris 8 (in the late 2000s :O). It makes me sad to see what Oracle has done to it. In any case, I suspect most users looking for a more 'authentic' UNIX flavor than Linux have shifted over to *BSD (My home file server runs FreeBSD -- mostly for the ZFS support -- hey, at least a file system from Solaris-land will live on).

errantmind 9y ago
I also ran FreeBSD for ZFS for a while. I ended switching and using ZFS on Linux and haven't had any issues, aside from a pool migration bug which the maintainers fixed very quickly: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs
busterarm 9y ago
I have fond memories of Solaris, but I'm pretty much on OpenBSD for good these days. It's really head-and-shoulders above anything else available these days, IMO. The closest alternative that I'd find acceptable might be Arch, but gosh, systemd is one of those things that just make me hate running systems.
- stutonk 9y ago
  You should have a look at Void Linux[1] (if you ever wanted to give Linux another shot). It uses runit for init instead of systemd and offers musl as an actively supported alternative to glibc. Its package manager is similar to the one in Arch in that it provides both rolling-release binary packages as well as a ports-style build system. Void also incorporates OpenBSD's LibreSSL by default. Everything else is kept as minimal and simple as possible. 1) https://www.voidlinux.eu/ https://www.voidlinux.eu/
  - 5ilv3r 9y ago
    Downloading. :) Thanks.

hyperrail 9y ago

What happens when security vulnerabilities are patched in a supported version of MongoDB? Will Solaris users simply never get those patches? The blog doesn't say that I could see.

jlgaddis 9y ago
> Existing release artifacts for Solaris will continue to be made available, but no new releases will be issued, barring a critical issue raised under an existing support contract covering MongoDB versions 3.0 through 3.4 running on Solaris. Sounds like those with a support contract can get a patch/update. I suppose everyone else is SOL.
- angus-prune 9y ago
  I read that as that they'll only work on issues raised under support contract, but would release the fixes to everyone.
  - metheus 9y ago
    See Aly's top-level comment re: patches and download numbers.

cpeterso 9y ago

It's ironic that ecosystem fragmentation is now a legitimate reason to drop Solaris when fragmentation had for a long time been a major concern for supporting Linux.

redm 9y ago

I have a lot of nostalgia for Solaris and Irix circa 2000. They had their uses and places, especially when coupled with SGI and Sun hardware. I think mostly the reason its nostalgic is that it reminds me of a "golden age" (late 1970's to mid-1990's?) of accessible computing when computers were still the domain of nerds.

pjmlp 9y ago
Me too, because Solaris, Irix and NeXTSTEP were the only UNIXes that had attempts to be something better than just XWIndows on top of POSIX.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

alyson-cabral 9y ago

I'm one of the Product Managers at MongoDB and I was a part of making this decision. It seems like there are two main areas where people are asking for more information: 1) exactly what are the numbers of Solaris downloads and 2) what about security patches of existing versions? I'm happy to clarify those points here and we will be posting an update to the blog to include this information. Based on the data we have, about 0.06% (and decreasing) of MongoDB users are running on Solaris. In addition, as Andrew mentioned in the blog, all of our customers have either deprecated Solaris or have told us they plan to deprecate it. In regards to security patches on Solaris, we will continue to fix critical flaws for the community, regardless of where found or how reported. Anyone can report a security vulnerability by using our Security project (https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SECURITY https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SECURITY) to create an account then a ticket describing the vulnerability.

SoMisanthrope 9y ago
It was the right decision, @alyson-cabral. The major market is linux-based, correct? There are better uses of company assets, than trying to chase the less-than-0.06% of holdouts that operate Solaris. As a person of science, I've used both Sun Solaris and SGI Irix.... time to let go of that past and pivot to the future!
- SoMisanthrope 9y ago
  Not sure why my relating my direct experience, respectfully... got me modded down. There are some really strange people with high karma scores. LOL What a joke.
- unethical_ban 9y ago
  You're shadowbanned.

bogomipz 9y ago

Interesting that one of the reasons for their dropping Solaris support is "Operational difficulties." The same would also be valid reason for saying "Farewell" to Mongodb. Anyone that's had to manage a MongoDB database could tell you about regularly having to manually re-synch their secondaries, manually having to run compactions to manage disk space(the power of 2 allocator), the automatic "balancer" process that sends I/O the roof, the rollback files etc. I think MongoDB being so operationally difficult is the prime reason that MongoDB offers a managed MongoDB PaaS offering.

peterwwillis 9y ago
Isn't every similar database a pain to support?
- bogomipz 9y ago
  What databases are similar to MongoDB either architecturally, storage engine or data model?

kev009 9y ago

Anyone smart enough to use SmartOS is not dumb enough to use MongoDB so nothing was lost.

jsiepkes 9y ago

Meanwhile in the comment section of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15124306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15124306 HackerNews MongoDB article basically everyone (who speaks up at least) seems to agree that the drawbacks of NoSQL outweigh the benefits.

rodgerd 9y ago

Unsurprising. As far as I can see Solaris is pretty much retreating into being in the same position as zOS (MVS): something Oracle ship with the integrated hardware stacks.

pharaohgeek 9y ago

Solaris has, historically, been my favorite operating system. I started using it when Sun made Solaris 7 available for free to anyone who requested it when I was in college. I still remember receiving a package in the mail with a nice set of packaged CDs and documentation! My college had standardized on Unix for development for homework assignments, and Linux at the time still seemed "immature" to me. I loved the stability and sanity I found with Solaris, and even saved up money to beef up my home PC so that it could run better (SCSI hard drives, more RAM, etc.) I used it up through version 10, but once Oracle took control and de-open-sourced it, I knew that was the beginning of the end.