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Unless you absolutely need BSD in production, there's a lot to be said to just use something more common/mainstream instead. I.e. Linux. It's probably going to

Unless you absolutely need BSD in production, there's a lot to be said to just use something more common/mainstream instead. I.e. Linux. It's probably going to be a lot cheaper and there's not a lot it can't do. I'm sure BSD has some unique features and properties that make it very appealing to use for certain things. However, what makes it very unappealing is the fact that there just aren't a lot of people with relevant skills and that the ones that do exist are probably on the expensive side. Many Linux users could probably train up, if they wanted or needed to. But the reality is that most never do that. Either way, hiring people with BSD skills is probably harder than finding people with Linux skills. The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. That's a big commitment to run anything and hiring is going to be tough. Bare metal linux has the same problem but with the difference that a lot of people have experience using it and there are all sorts of companies that can support you with this. And people tend to start using linux in cloud based environments where they can outsource the business of keeping the environment up and running. So Linux allows you to start very cheaply, relying on skills most devops people and developers already have, and then later transition to a bare metal setup with some standardized thing from a company that can offer you lots of support. No reason BSD could not work like that but of course it has been historically been like that at all and is mostly a thing that shows up on bare metal instead in a few companies that for whatever reason decided that was a good idea; maybe a very long time ago. Running BSD on a vm hosted on linux is of course possible but probably does not make a lot of sense. Doing it the other way around might make sense if you are in the PAAS/IAAS business but it seems most of that industry has long standardized on Linux. Would there be any benefit for them to switch?

steeleduncan 4y ago
> The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way . . . would run close to a million per year If true, this would of course be a great reason not to use BSD, but I've seen too many single person startups on HN using FreeBSD over the years to believe this statement.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Lots of startups fail. Lots more get lucky just not having anywhere close to five 9s or people that just don't take vacations, leave, get sick, etc. Been there done that. The wiser move is to outsource risk like that to cloud services. It will cost you but far less than hiring a team to get your five nines of uptime would. I maintain several clusters and we have a few people that can do some emergency fixes. But I am a bottleneck when it comes to knowing how to. Having BSD in the mix would make this far worse for us.
bigpeopleareold 4y ago
I absolutely need to use BSD for my hobby pursuits :) I think that reasoning is iron clad :D (In probably a lot of cases, that's where future popular things start.) Certainly, if I was in the position to make infrastructure decisions for my employer (which I am not, plan never to so it will never happen), then the decision has mostly been made for me. In fact, many decisions have been made, and it doesn't just stop at relying Linux and the GNU userland if I rely on a popular distribution. FWIW, there is a lot of obscured differences between BSDs and GNU/Linuxs as I see, but installing and getting setup on FreeBSD on my laptop felt quite familiar (maybe more culture shocks than anything - like there is no `sudo` in the base system :) )
- technothrasher 4y ago
  > installing and getting setup on FreeBSD on my laptop felt quite familiar Yeah, people are making it out like the two environments are totally different from each other. Any competent Linux admin would be able to cross-train on any of the BSDs pretty quickly, and vice-versa. It's mostly a matter of, "Hey Google, where the hell is X in TrendyBSD? Ok, thanks."
trasz 4y ago
>The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. It's the price of not being dependent on IBM, Oracle, or any other customer-hostile company. Besides, frankly, those 4-6 people will provide _way_ better quality of service than offshoring.
throw0101a 4y ago
> The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. That's a big commitment to run anything and hiring is going to be tough. Meanwhile WhatsApp ran their entire infrastructure on FreeBSD and were able to serve a billion end-users with not a lot of people.
- trasz 4y ago
  There are many more Whatsapp-like stories; see https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/testimonials/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/testimonials/.
- nix23 4y ago
  And i would even argue that it's easier to learn FreeBSD coming from Linux-X then to Switch from, for example RedHat to Ubuntu.
- NexRebular 4y ago
  Maybe FreeBSD is more reliable and has better documentation so it doesn't eat up as much admin resources as its "competitors"?
  - tristan957 4y ago
    I have read that the FreeBSD networking stack is one of the best out there. Some of the largest companies are running their products on FreeBSD. Facebook, I believe, runs a ton of FreeBSD.
    - comprev 4y ago
      Hotmail originally ran on FreeBSD, as did WhatsApp (might have changed now). Netflix still uses it for their caching boxes and probably elsewhere in the infrastructure.
UI_at_80x24 4y ago
>The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. That's a big commitment to run anything and hiring is going to be tough. This is flat-out wrong. I single-handedly managed a fleet of over 100 FreeBSD servers running in various data-centers all over the world. 90% Nginx, 10% Apache. Mostly Wordpress websites. The 'brand' was #3 in the world for it's niche. $Million+ revenue. In my experience, BSD is EASIER then Linux.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  So, what happens when you sleep and any of your 100 servers go down; or you are on vacation; or you get hit by a bus; etc. and they need somebody with BSD skills to fix it? Don't tell me that doesn't happen. The words "single handedly" are a dead give away: you're a single point of failure unless there's more than 1 of you. It might be easier for you personally. But for a typical organization finding 4-6 of you would be a challenge. And unless they would, it would be a problem waiting to happen.
  - greggyb 4y ago
    The problem you describe is the same for any org that needs sysadmins. Linux or Windows can go down as easily as FreeBSD, and a single operator would be just as much a point of failure. What should an organization that cannot afford a full operations team do? This is not an OS question.
    - donkeybeer 4y ago
      What is being tried to be said is that it is much harder to find a BSD person than it is to find a Linux or Windows person.
      - nmz 4y ago
        While you may have a point that its harder to find a BSD person, I would say because BSD has a cathedratic model, it is much much easier to get up to date with it. While Linux has sporadic documentation, you have to go scavenge through the entire internet looking for answers, everything is in one place, the freebsd forum. ports itself even comes with a file containing bugfixes and notes, telling you what breaks and what precautions to take with each software. The bazaar model is hard to grasp and learn from. GNU has pushed their business model to be books. It means you have incomplete documentation (man pages) everywhere. You either buy the books to know how things work internally, or hopefully someone somewhere jotted down your problem/solution, albeit in SO, a ML, some book or who knows where.
dazzawazza 4y ago
>The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. That's a big commitment to run anything and hiring is going to be tough. I remember when MS used to say similar things about Linux.
quesera 4y ago
> The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. This is obviously incorrect. But if you're making a statement about how many people you need to staff 24x7x365 operations, the exact same math applies to Linux.
mekster 4y ago
> I'm sure BSD has some unique features and properties that make it very appealing to use for certain things. I really would like to know but only on practical points. (Not like "the documents are good", "well integrated" kind of points that never are primary points to use FreeBSD)
jlg23 4y ago
> The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. That's a big commitment to run anything and hiring is going to be tough. Not sure where you got your numbers from, but I have been maintaining FreeBSD servers for 2 decades and would estimate the attention a machine needs at about 10% of what a Linux box needs.
- OrvalWintermute 4y ago
  > I have been maintaining FreeBSD servers for 2 decades and would estimate the attention a machine needs at about 10% of what a Linux box needs. I was talking with a longtime Linux security administrator about why he was converting much of his security stack over to OpenBSD and retiring his Linux security boxes in mass. Similar to what you mentioned, he estimated his maintenance needs for OpenBSD at 5-10% of equivalent Linux systems, and the increased security posture was gravy on top.
comprev 4y ago
The learning curve from Linux to BSD is not much really. I took on a gig looking after 100+ FreeBSD boxes (IBM bare metal servers) and the transition was much easier than expected. The documentation is fantastic, and the separation of "base" vs 3rd party software/config was a refreshing change. The client opted for FreeBSD as the OS seemed to handle much bigger traffic without breaking a sweat (HAProxy, Nginx, PHP & MySQL) Overall I enjoyed the exposure to FreeBSD and learned a lot in the process.
jjav 4y ago
> there's a lot to be said to just use something more common/mainstream instead. I.e. Linux For those of us who worked the industry in the 90s and remember the pains of "just use windows like a normal person and forget this weird linux hobby thing", there's some irony in saying that. Common/mainstream doesn't always (even usually) mean better. With Linux (not Linux the actual kernel, but Linux userspace distros) going in directions away from security and stability in the search for mainstream-ness, the BSDs feel like breath of fresh air these days. Very similar to how Linux felt back when everyone was telling me to run windows.

steeleduncan 4y ago

> The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way . . . would run close to a million per year If true, this would of course be a great reason not to use BSD, but I've seen too many single person startups on HN using FreeBSD over the years to believe this statement.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
Lots of startups fail. Lots more get lucky just not having anywhere close to five 9s or people that just don't take vacations, leave, get sick, etc. Been there done that. The wiser move is to outsource risk like that to cloud services. It will cost you but far less than hiring a team to get your five nines of uptime would. I maintain several clusters and we have a few people that can do some emergency fixes. But I am a bottleneck when it comes to knowing how to. Having BSD in the mix would make this far worse for us.

bigpeopleareold 4y ago

I absolutely need to use BSD for my hobby pursuits :) I think that reasoning is iron clad :D (In probably a lot of cases, that's where future popular things start.) Certainly, if I was in the position to make infrastructure decisions for my employer (which I am not, plan never to so it will never happen), then the decision has mostly been made for me. In fact, many decisions have been made, and it doesn't just stop at relying Linux and the GNU userland if I rely on a popular distribution. FWIW, there is a lot of obscured differences between BSDs and GNU/Linuxs as I see, but installing and getting setup on FreeBSD on my laptop felt quite familiar (maybe more culture shocks than anything - like there is no `sudo` in the base system :) )

technothrasher 4y ago
> installing and getting setup on FreeBSD on my laptop felt quite familiar Yeah, people are making it out like the two environments are totally different from each other. Any competent Linux admin would be able to cross-train on any of the BSDs pretty quickly, and vice-versa. It's mostly a matter of, "Hey Google, where the hell is X in TrendyBSD? Ok, thanks."

trasz 4y ago

>The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. It's the price of not being dependent on IBM, Oracle, or any other customer-hostile company. Besides, frankly, those 4-6 people will provide _way_ better quality of service than offshoring.

throw0101a 4y ago

> The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. That's a big commitment to run anything and hiring is going to be tough. Meanwhile WhatsApp ran their entire infrastructure on FreeBSD and were able to serve a billion end-users with not a lot of people.

trasz 4y ago
There are many more Whatsapp-like stories; see https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/testimonials/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/testimonials/.
nix23 4y ago
And i would even argue that it's easier to learn FreeBSD coming from Linux-X then to Switch from, for example RedHat to Ubuntu.
NexRebular 4y ago
Maybe FreeBSD is more reliable and has better documentation so it doesn't eat up as much admin resources as its "competitors"?
- tristan957 4y ago
  I have read that the FreeBSD networking stack is one of the best out there. Some of the largest companies are running their products on FreeBSD. Facebook, I believe, runs a ton of FreeBSD.
  - comprev 4y ago
    Hotmail originally ran on FreeBSD, as did WhatsApp (might have changed now). Netflix still uses it for their caching boxes and probably elsewhere in the infrastructure.

UI_at_80x24 4y ago

>The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. That's a big commitment to run anything and hiring is going to be tough. This is flat-out wrong. I single-handedly managed a fleet of over 100 FreeBSD servers running in various data-centers all over the world. 90% Nginx, 10% Apache. Mostly Wordpress websites. The 'brand' was #3 in the world for it's niche. $Million+ revenue. In my experience, BSD is EASIER then Linux.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
So, what happens when you sleep and any of your 100 servers go down; or you are on vacation; or you get hit by a bus; etc. and they need somebody with BSD skills to fix it? Don't tell me that doesn't happen. The words "single handedly" are a dead give away: you're a single point of failure unless there's more than 1 of you. It might be easier for you personally. But for a typical organization finding 4-6 of you would be a challenge. And unless they would, it would be a problem waiting to happen.
- greggyb 4y ago
  The problem you describe is the same for any org that needs sysadmins. Linux or Windows can go down as easily as FreeBSD, and a single operator would be just as much a point of failure. What should an organization that cannot afford a full operations team do? This is not an OS question.
  - donkeybeer 4y ago
    What is being tried to be said is that it is much harder to find a BSD person than it is to find a Linux or Windows person.
    - nmz 4y ago
      While you may have a point that its harder to find a BSD person, I would say because BSD has a cathedratic model, it is much much easier to get up to date with it. While Linux has sporadic documentation, you have to go scavenge through the entire internet looking for answers, everything is in one place, the freebsd forum. ports itself even comes with a file containing bugfixes and notes, telling you what breaks and what precautions to take with each software. The bazaar model is hard to grasp and learn from. GNU has pushed their business model to be books. It means you have incomplete documentation (man pages) everywhere. You either buy the books to know how things work internally, or hopefully someone somewhere jotted down your problem/solution, albeit in SO, a ML, some book or who knows where.

dazzawazza 4y ago

quesera 4y ago

> The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. This is obviously incorrect. But if you're making a statement about how many people you need to staff 24x7x365 operations, the exact same math applies to Linux.

mekster 4y ago

> I'm sure BSD has some unique features and properties that make it very appealing to use for certain things. I really would like to know but only on practical points. (Not like "the documents are good", "well integrated" kind of points that never are primary points to use FreeBSD)

jlg23 4y ago

> The price of running BSD in production in a responsible way is that you need a fairly sizable team of >4-6 people. Probably salary cost alone would run close to a million per year. That's a big commitment to run anything and hiring is going to be tough. Not sure where you got your numbers from, but I have been maintaining FreeBSD servers for 2 decades and would estimate the attention a machine needs at about 10% of what a Linux box needs.

OrvalWintermute 4y ago
> I have been maintaining FreeBSD servers for 2 decades and would estimate the attention a machine needs at about 10% of what a Linux box needs. I was talking with a longtime Linux security administrator about why he was converting much of his security stack over to OpenBSD and retiring his Linux security boxes in mass. Similar to what you mentioned, he estimated his maintenance needs for OpenBSD at 5-10% of equivalent Linux systems, and the increased security posture was gravy on top.

comprev 4y ago

The learning curve from Linux to BSD is not much really. I took on a gig looking after 100+ FreeBSD boxes (IBM bare metal servers) and the transition was much easier than expected. The documentation is fantastic, and the separation of "base" vs 3rd party software/config was a refreshing change. The client opted for FreeBSD as the OS seemed to handle much bigger traffic without breaking a sweat (HAProxy, Nginx, PHP & MySQL) Overall I enjoyed the exposure to FreeBSD and learned a lot in the process.

jjav 4y ago

> there's a lot to be said to just use something more common/mainstream instead. I.e. Linux For those of us who worked the industry in the 90s and remember the pains of "just use windows like a normal person and forget this weird linux hobby thing", there's some irony in saying that. Common/mainstream doesn't always (even usually) mean better. With Linux (not Linux the actual kernel, but Linux userspace distros) going in directions away from security and stability in the search for mainstream-ness, the BSDs feel like breath of fresh air these days. Very similar to how Linux felt back when everyone was telling me to run windows.