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> When you're deploying VMs, which is the use case here, the substrate OS becomes significantly less important. Those VMs will mostly just be linux. Now you ne

> When you're deploying VMs, which is the use case here, the substrate OS becomes significantly less important. Those VMs will mostly just be linux. Now you need to know both the OS they chose and the OS you chose... (No, I don't believe it'll be 100% hands-off for the host. This is an early stage product, with a lot of custom parts, their own distributed block storage, hypervisor, and so on.)

sanderjd 3y ago
I have no clue what OS runs my VMs on EC2.
tinco 3y ago
This true for other hypervisors too. Enterprises are still paying hundreds of millions to VMware, who knows what's going on in there? I wouldn't have picked Opensolaris, but it's a lot better than other vendors that are either fully closed source, or thin proprietary wrappers over Linux with spotty coverage and you're not allowed to touch the underlying OS for risk of disrupting the managed product.
- sgt 3y ago
  What's more important is that the team actually knows Illumos/Solaris inside out. You can work wonders with a less than ideal system. That said, Illumos is of high quality in my opinion.
  - Always_Anon 3y ago
    Seems risky considering how small of a developer pool actively works on illumos/Solaris. The code is most definitely well engineered and correct, but there are huge teams all around the world deploying on huge pools of Linux compute that have contributed back to Linux.
    - tinco 3y ago
      They had a bug in the database they are using that was due to a Go system library not behaving correctly specifically on illumos. They've got enough engineering power to deal with such a thing but damn..
    - mbakke 3y ago
      If everyone had this mindset we would be running our workloads on Microsoft Windows by now. GNU/Linux was also "risky" at some point.
      - yencabulator 3y ago
        Linux grew up in the bedrooms of teenagers. It was risky in the era of 486 and Pentiums. The environment and business criticality of a $1-2M rack-size computer is quite different.
        ddalex 3y ago
        This is a skewed view - the critical piece that made Linux "enterprise-ish" was the memory management system that was contributed by IBM, part of the SCO lawsuit
        mbakke 3y ago
        I had similar thoughts about VMware (large installations) back in the day. Weird proprietary OS to run other operating systems? Yet they turned out fine. This appears to be a much better system than VMware, is free as in software, and it builds upon a free software operating system with lineage that predates Linux. I say this in the most critical way possible, as someone who has built multiple Linux-based "cloud systems", and as a GNU/Linux distribution developer: I love it!
        usefulcat 3y ago
        Completely tangential, but this reminds me of an interview I had for my first job out of college in 1995. I mentioned to the interviewer that I had some Linux experience. "Ah, Linux" he said. "A cool little toy that's gonna take over the world". In hindsight of course it was remarkably prescient. This from a guy at a company that was built entirely around SGI at the time.

sanderjd 3y ago

I have no clue what OS runs my VMs on EC2.

tinco 3y ago

This true for other hypervisors too. Enterprises are still paying hundreds of millions to VMware, who knows what's going on in there? I wouldn't have picked Opensolaris, but it's a lot better than other vendors that are either fully closed source, or thin proprietary wrappers over Linux with spotty coverage and you're not allowed to touch the underlying OS for risk of disrupting the managed product.

sgt 3y ago
What's more important is that the team actually knows Illumos/Solaris inside out. You can work wonders with a less than ideal system. That said, Illumos is of high quality in my opinion.
- Always_Anon 3y ago
  Seems risky considering how small of a developer pool actively works on illumos/Solaris. The code is most definitely well engineered and correct, but there are huge teams all around the world deploying on huge pools of Linux compute that have contributed back to Linux.
  - tinco 3y ago
    They had a bug in the database they are using that was due to a Go system library not behaving correctly specifically on illumos. They've got enough engineering power to deal with such a thing but damn..
  - mbakke 3y ago
    If everyone had this mindset we would be running our workloads on Microsoft Windows by now. GNU/Linux was also "risky" at some point.
    - yencabulator 3y ago
      Linux grew up in the bedrooms of teenagers. It was risky in the era of 486 and Pentiums. The environment and business criticality of a $1-2M rack-size computer is quite different.
      - ddalex 3y ago
        This is a skewed view - the critical piece that made Linux "enterprise-ish" was the memory management system that was contributed by IBM, part of the SCO lawsuit
      - mbakke 3y ago
        I had similar thoughts about VMware (large installations) back in the day. Weird proprietary OS to run other operating systems? Yet they turned out fine. This appears to be a much better system than VMware, is free as in software, and it builds upon a free software operating system with lineage that predates Linux. I say this in the most critical way possible, as someone who has built multiple Linux-based "cloud systems", and as a GNU/Linux distribution developer: I love it!
      - usefulcat 3y ago
        Completely tangential, but this reminds me of an interview I had for my first job out of college in 1995. I mentioned to the interviewer that I had some Linux experience. "Ah, Linux" he said. "A cool little toy that's gonna take over the world". In hindsight of course it was remarkably prescient. This from a guy at a company that was built entirely around SGI at the time.