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I'm running my most recent project partially on SmartOS via Joyent's public cloud, Triton. The experience is a mixed bag. SmartOS itself is absolutely fantastic

I'm running my most recent project partially on SmartOS via Joyent's public cloud, Triton. The experience is a mixed bag. SmartOS itself is absolutely fantastic (I also have a few Debian hosts left over, but I'd like to migrate those to SmartOS as well), and Triton is great as long as you avoid the web UI, which is unbearably hard to use if you have a slow connection (or even if you don't, but I use Terraform and Packer so I mostly don't have to look at the UI). The only real problem is that Joyent either doesn't document anything, or it's hard to find, and they don't maintain half the software they advertise (but also won't confirm or deny that it's not maintained or mark it as unmaintained, so good luck finding out what you should be using instead). When it comes down to it though I prefer Triton to the other big cloud providers just because the firewall product is fantastic, bare-metal machines running SmartOS are fantastic, and best of all it's not Amazon (which is all I really want, if I'm honest).

masklinn 8y ago
> The only real problem is that Joyent either doesn't document anything, or it's hard to find, and they don't maintain half the software they advertise (but also won't confirm or deny that it's not maintained or mark it as unmaintained, so good luck finding out what you should be using instead). Have you sent that feedback, possibly pinged bcantrill on the issue (being Joyent's CTO I'd expect devdocs would fall under his purview)?
- SamWhited 8y ago
  Yes, I've mentioned it to support. (EDIT*: removed "multiple times" because I'm not sure that's true; I forget if it was just once or if I followed up about other projects)
bcantrill 8y ago
Glad to hear that there are aspects of SmartOS that you enjoy, and sorry that it's been a mixed bag. More specifically, my apologies on the documentation: it's an area in which we've always been very short staffed, and our focus on documentation has necessarily been more aligned with our products than our projects. As for maintaining software: if you can be more specific where you're running into issues, we can figure out what's going on. Generally, we don't have too much software that isn't maintained at all, but we also do reimplement components from time to time, and you might have run into an issue on a component that is being replaced -- but my apologies if or where we weren't upfront about that...
- SamWhited 8y ago
  Thanks for the reply; the problem I've had is mostly with things on your GitHub and images you maintain. For example, I asked about the Postgres image and whether it was maintained ages ago and was told that you're not sure if you'll maintain it or not. This is fair, and I don't expect updates the next day, but it's still on Postgres 9.6 and doesn't mention if you plan on ever updating it again. If not, that's fine, but please mark it as such so we know if we should rely on that image or not (we're building our own right now, which is fine, but we'd rather know). Also, lots of little things on GitHub like the examples of using Prometheus and others have PRs (some of them by me) which have never had any comments, no acknowledgement that they've been seen, but also no indication that the project isn't maintained or is just an example and that we shouldn't submit PRs. All that being said, in general thanks for a great product.
  - bahamat 8y ago
    Most of the application specific images have stopped receiving updates. This is because they were time consuming to create/validate, and were mostly just the base-64 image with whatever package pre-installed via pkgin. This was also happened around the time of the rise of Docker, so most people were opting for docker images produced by upstream maintainers. In most cases, you can just make a base-64 image and `pkgin in` whatever package you wanted and it's pretty much the same thing. The Prometheus stuff is heavily used by us internally, and while it's usable, it's pretty experimental (i.e., changing quickly). I don't see any pull requests or issues that are obviously from you, so if you point me at something I can take a look at it.

masklinn 8y ago

> The only real problem is that Joyent either doesn't document anything, or it's hard to find, and they don't maintain half the software they advertise (but also won't confirm or deny that it's not maintained or mark it as unmaintained, so good luck finding out what you should be using instead). Have you sent that feedback, possibly pinged bcantrill on the issue (being Joyent's CTO I'd expect devdocs would fall under his purview)?

SamWhited 8y ago
Yes, I've mentioned it to support. (EDIT*: removed "multiple times" because I'm not sure that's true; I forget if it was just once or if I followed up about other projects)

bcantrill 8y ago

Glad to hear that there are aspects of SmartOS that you enjoy, and sorry that it's been a mixed bag. More specifically, my apologies on the documentation: it's an area in which we've always been very short staffed, and our focus on documentation has necessarily been more aligned with our products than our projects. As for maintaining software: if you can be more specific where you're running into issues, we can figure out what's going on. Generally, we don't have too much software that isn't maintained at all, but we also do reimplement components from time to time, and you might have run into an issue on a component that is being replaced -- but my apologies if or where we weren't upfront about that...

SamWhited 8y ago
Thanks for the reply; the problem I've had is mostly with things on your GitHub and images you maintain. For example, I asked about the Postgres image and whether it was maintained ages ago and was told that you're not sure if you'll maintain it or not. This is fair, and I don't expect updates the next day, but it's still on Postgres 9.6 and doesn't mention if you plan on ever updating it again. If not, that's fine, but please mark it as such so we know if we should rely on that image or not (we're building our own right now, which is fine, but we'd rather know). Also, lots of little things on GitHub like the examples of using Prometheus and others have PRs (some of them by me) which have never had any comments, no acknowledgement that they've been seen, but also no indication that the project isn't maintained or is just an example and that we shouldn't submit PRs. All that being said, in general thanks for a great product.
- bahamat 8y ago
  Most of the application specific images have stopped receiving updates. This is because they were time consuming to create/validate, and were mostly just the base-64 image with whatever package pre-installed via pkgin. This was also happened around the time of the rise of Docker, so most people were opting for docker images produced by upstream maintainers. In most cases, you can just make a base-64 image and `pkgin in` whatever package you wanted and it's pretty much the same thing. The Prometheus stuff is heavily used by us internally, and while it's usable, it's pretty experimental (i.e., changing quickly). I don't see any pull requests or issues that are obviously from you, so if you point me at something I can take a look at it.