4 ms·

Instead of stating more or less irrelevant reasons, I'd prefer to read something like "I am (have been?) one of the core maintainers and know Illumos and Bhyve,

Instead of stating more or less irrelevant reasons, I'd prefer to read something like "I am (have been?) one of the core maintainers and know Illumos and Bhyve, so even if there would be 'objectively' better choices, our familiarity with the OS and hypervisor trump that". A "I like $A, always use $A and have experience using $A" is almost always a better argument than "$A is better than $B because $BLA", because that doesn't tell me anything about the depth of knowledge of using $A and $B or the knowledge of the subject of decision - there is a reason half of Google's results is some kind of "comparison" spam.

actionfromafar 2y ago
But everyone at Oxide already knows that back story. At least if you list some other reasons list you can have a discussion about technical merits if you want to.
- ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
  But that doesn't make sense if you have specialists for $A that also like to work with $A. Why should I as a customer trust Illumos/Bhye developers that are using Linux/KVM instead of "real" Linux/KVM developers? The only thing that such a decision would tell me is to not even think about using Illumos or Bhyve. The difference between "Buy our Illumos/Bhye solution! Why? I have been an Illumos/Bhyve Maintainer!" and "Buy our Linux/KVM solution! Why? I have been an Illumos/Bhyve Maintainer!" should make my point a bit clearer
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    Those are not the only options. You can have KVM on Illumos, or Bhye on FreeBSD. And finding people to heir that know Linux/KVM wouldn't be a problem for them. This evaluation was done years ago and they added like 50 people since then. Saying 'We have a great KVM Team but our CEO was once an Illumos developer' is perfectly reasonable. And as I point out in my other comment, the former Joyant people like know more about KVM then anything else anyway. So it would be: "Buy our KVM Solution, we have KVM experts" But they evaluated that Bhyve was better then KVM despite that.
    - ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
      > "Buy our KVM Solution, we have KVM experts" Of course, but that is less of unique selling point. > But they evaluated that Bhyve was better then KVM despite that. If you are selling Bhyve you better say that whether it's true or not. So why should I, as a reader or employee or customer, trust them?
      - panick21_ 2y ago
        > Of course, but that is less of unique selling point. Who cares about uniqueness? That's not a goal. > If you are selling Bhyve you better say that whether it's true or not. So why should I, as a reader or employee or customer, trust them? They are not selling Bhyve. This is an internal document. Their costumers don't care about the implementation details. And if they do, then they will do their own evaluation based on their own evaluation. As an employee you trust it because you know how the company heirs and who wrote these RFDs. As a reader, its literally like any other thing on the internet.
panick21_ 2y ago
But Bryan also ported KVM to Illumos. And Joyand used KVM and they supported KVM there for years, I assume Bryan knows more about KVM then Bhyve as he seemed very hands on in the implementation (there is nice talk on youtube). So the idea that he isn't familiar with KVM isn't the case. So based on that KVM or Bhyve on Illumos, KVM would suggest itself. In the long term if $A is actually better then $B, then it makes sense to start with $A even if you don't know $A. Because if you are trying to building a company that is hopefully making billions in revenue in the future, then long term matters a great deal. Now the question is can you objectively figure out if $A or $B is better. And how much time does it take to figure out. Familiarity of the team is one consideration but not the most important one. Trying to be objective about this, instead of just saying 'I know $A' seems quite like a smart thing to do. And writing it down also seems smart. In a few years you can look back and actually say, was our analysis correct, if no what did we misjudge. And then you can learn from that. If you just go with familiarity you are basically saying 'our failure was predetermined so we did nothing wrong', when you clearly did go wrong.
- jclulow 2y ago
  For what it's worth, we at _Joyent_ were seriously investing in bhyve as our next generation of hypervisor for quite a while. We had been diverging from upstream KVM, and most especially upstream QEMU, for a long time, and bhyve was a better fit for us for a variety of reasons. We adopted a port that had begun at Pluribus, another company that was doing things with OpenSolaris and eventually illumos, and Bryan lead us through that period as well.
  - ComputerGuru 2y ago
    Are you/will you be upstreaming fixes and/or improvements to Bhyve?
    - jclulow 2y ago
      Yes, my personal goal is to ensure that basically everything we do in the Oxide "stlouis" branch of illumos eventually goes upstream to illumos-gate where it filters down to everyone else!

actionfromafar 2y ago

But everyone at Oxide already knows that back story. At least if you list some other reasons list you can have a discussion about technical merits if you want to.

ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
But that doesn't make sense if you have specialists for $A that also like to work with $A. Why should I as a customer trust Illumos/Bhye developers that are using Linux/KVM instead of "real" Linux/KVM developers? The only thing that such a decision would tell me is to not even think about using Illumos or Bhyve. The difference between "Buy our Illumos/Bhye solution! Why? I have been an Illumos/Bhyve Maintainer!" and "Buy our Linux/KVM solution! Why? I have been an Illumos/Bhyve Maintainer!" should make my point a bit clearer
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Those are not the only options. You can have KVM on Illumos, or Bhye on FreeBSD. And finding people to heir that know Linux/KVM wouldn't be a problem for them. This evaluation was done years ago and they added like 50 people since then. Saying 'We have a great KVM Team but our CEO was once an Illumos developer' is perfectly reasonable. And as I point out in my other comment, the former Joyant people like know more about KVM then anything else anyway. So it would be: "Buy our KVM Solution, we have KVM experts" But they evaluated that Bhyve was better then KVM despite that.
  - ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
    > "Buy our KVM Solution, we have KVM experts" Of course, but that is less of unique selling point. > But they evaluated that Bhyve was better then KVM despite that. If you are selling Bhyve you better say that whether it's true or not. So why should I, as a reader or employee or customer, trust them?
    - panick21_ 2y ago
      > Of course, but that is less of unique selling point. Who cares about uniqueness? That's not a goal. > If you are selling Bhyve you better say that whether it's true or not. So why should I, as a reader or employee or customer, trust them? They are not selling Bhyve. This is an internal document. Their costumers don't care about the implementation details. And if they do, then they will do their own evaluation based on their own evaluation. As an employee you trust it because you know how the company heirs and who wrote these RFDs. As a reader, its literally like any other thing on the internet.

panick21_ 2y ago

But Bryan also ported KVM to Illumos. And Joyand used KVM and they supported KVM there for years, I assume Bryan knows more about KVM then Bhyve as he seemed very hands on in the implementation (there is nice talk on youtube). So the idea that he isn't familiar with KVM isn't the case. So based on that KVM or Bhyve on Illumos, KVM would suggest itself. In the long term if $A is actually better then $B, then it makes sense to start with $A even if you don't know $A. Because if you are trying to building a company that is hopefully making billions in revenue in the future, then long term matters a great deal. Now the question is can you objectively figure out if $A or $B is better. And how much time does it take to figure out. Familiarity of the team is one consideration but not the most important one. Trying to be objective about this, instead of just saying 'I know $A' seems quite like a smart thing to do. And writing it down also seems smart. In a few years you can look back and actually say, was our analysis correct, if no what did we misjudge. And then you can learn from that. If you just go with familiarity you are basically saying 'our failure was predetermined so we did nothing wrong', when you clearly did go wrong.

jclulow 2y ago
For what it's worth, we at _Joyent_ were seriously investing in bhyve as our next generation of hypervisor for quite a while. We had been diverging from upstream KVM, and most especially upstream QEMU, for a long time, and bhyve was a better fit for us for a variety of reasons. We adopted a port that had begun at Pluribus, another company that was doing things with OpenSolaris and eventually illumos, and Bryan lead us through that period as well.
- ComputerGuru 2y ago
  Are you/will you be upstreaming fixes and/or improvements to Bhyve?
  - jclulow 2y ago
    Yes, my personal goal is to ensure that basically everything we do in the Oxide "stlouis" branch of illumos eventually goes upstream to illumos-gate where it filters down to everyone else!