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The nail in the coffin was Delphix switching away from Illumos for similar reasons the author cites in another article. As they drive most of the complex featu
by kev009 8y ago
The nail in the coffin was Delphix switching away from Illumos for similar reasons the author cites in another article. As they drive most of the complex feature development directly with staff developers, and by virtue of having Matt Ahrens on staff drive a lot of the leadership and organization of ZFS, it makes sense to follow their lead as the repo of truth and lower the barrier to entry (illusions-gate wasn't working out).
Since FreeBSD support is going to be merged directly into the ZoL repo, ZoL devs will see the FreeBSD CI build results and it will be a lot closer to a unified upstream than the past. Being a downstream instead of integrated into the source of truth made feature development a laborious two way sync and communications were spread over many mailing lists and bug trackers. I think this move will be good for both communities, companies like iX Systems will help get trim across the finish line in ZoL.
In terms of shifting userbase, FreeBSD might even win in terms of ZFS revenue or other metrics like shipping systems due to FreeNAS (would have to spend a few hours researching the ZoL companies business models since a lot of the work is subsidized by the US Government via LLNL). I don't think there will be any tectonic shifts in userbase, there are still pros and cons to both Linux and FreeBSD in different areas and being behind in ZFS wont be wont be a con for either now.
- jabl 8y agoLLNL interest in ZFS is, AFAICS, motivated by using it in their Lustre clusters. And Lustre is pretty solidly Linux-only.
- bubblethink 8y ago>I don't think there will be any tectonic shifts in userbase Unrelated to this post, I'm quite interested in knowing how Canonical's move has worked out so far. Does anyone know if they've got customers at any meaningful scale who are using ZoL ? Or is Canonical contributing to ZoL ? There may not be an immediate shift in userbase, but Canonical can certainly make a more comprehensive bid to future customers with their overall offering that also includes ZoL, compared to a specialty storage provider that supports ZFS on FreeBSD.
- kev009 8y agoI think it has mostly lowered the barrier to entry for Linux users already interested in ZFS, which is a good thing for user experience, but I haven't seen Canonical driving any feature dev and they aren't doing extensive backports or uplifts into their LTS distros to stay current with ZoL AFAIK. If they wanted to monetize it better, they could do a spin for the SOHO market that either helped replace proprietary filers the same way FreeNAS does, or highly integrate it into their private cloud stack.
- jclulow 8y ago"illusions-gate"?
- heyjudy 8y agoAsk iXsystems. They run FreeNAS to sell hardware and support.