"If you are on Kubernetes, then you are not locked in to any cloud provider"
...but I would be beholden to GNU/Linux and have to do the same thing I do with SmartOS in a far more complex way, built on an operating system substrate which cannot provide the reliability that I need to be able to sleep through my nights without an incident.
Kubernetes, Docker, Linux are a time sink that I can never get back, on things which Solaris solved far better and reliably 20 years ago. I don't want to go from a Pegasus to a donkey.
> the same thing I do with SmartOS in a far more complex way
Citation needed. Yes, Kubernetes runs on Linux kernel and until someone ports it to use something other than iptables and the linux cgroups API, that will be true. But I could say the same thing about being locked into SVR4/OpenSolaris, and I bet you a Coke that a lot more people will agree with me.
The Kubernetes slack community has over 48,000 members and nearly 1000 are online right now. Can you say that about SmartOS? There's a ton of value in that vibrant community. This is not meant to be a dig, seriously where do you go when you need SmartOS support?
Don't waste your time, he's a troll that pops up on every thread that has anything to do with things like docker or k8s. It doesn't matter what the problem is, smartos is the solution.
SmartOS is solid technology, but he doesn't have the slightest clue what k8s does, but is completely certain that smartos somehow does "the same thing" better.
They aren't even mutually exclusive, there's no reason you couldn't write a CRI backend to run k8s on top of zones on smartos.
I suppose my comment appears harsh if you haven't seen month after month of his "smartos solves every problem and linux users are too stupid to know how to computer properly" type comments. read the guys bio:
> There exist no words in any of the languages I speak which can express my hate of GNU and GNU/Linux.
> I was raised on IRIX, HP-UX and Solaris. Huge illumos / SmartOS fan and FreeBSD sympathizer.
It's hard not to attack someone personally when their entire persona is tied to promoting a particular technology every chance they get.
The funny thing is all of his comments do absolutely nothing to convince anyone that smartos is worth looking at, which is a shame because it's actually quite nice.
"There exist no words in any of the languages I speak which can express my hate of GNU and GNU/Linux."
And I stand by that statement: if I didn't, it wouldn't be on my biography. I think it's fair and honest disclosure, rather than philosophy and playing with words. I mean what I say and I say what I mean.
Still, ad hominem attacks on someone with an opposing view do little to further your argument; at best, it comes across as nothing but opinion.
For my part, I provided citations to make my point. I regret that you didn't seem to read through them before answering.
"Don't waste your time, he's a troll that pops up on every thread that has anything to do with things like docker or k8s."
Thank you for an off-topic opinion. Yes, I do "pop up" on every Kubernetes and Docker topic because both are nothing but hype and bullshit (this topic with "no thanks" is a rare exception, and I wholeheartedly agree with the author of it, even though I vehemently disagree with some of his methods). What the hell do I need an "orchestrator" like Kubernetes for if all my components are packaged and I have a software deployment server where I can mass deploy to all my systems at will? (Hint: I don't.) Kubernetes is a solution to a string of bad decisions, making the situation even worse.
And Kubernetes is nothing but a provisioning solution. If you think Kubernetes is an orchestrator, you've never seen one. Nolio is an orchestrator.
So what if Joyent has Kubernetes support? Joyent isn't infallible, just because they make SmartOS that doesn't make them right in everything. It's not like they can do no wrong. Let's refrain from fanboyism; being Joyent doesn't automatically make them right in everything they do.
The personal attack wasn't ok, but please don't "pop up" on every thread to say predictable things. Pre-existing agendas are tedious, and tedium is what we all come here to avoid.
If we're here to avoid pre-existing agendas, then Docker and Kubernetes promotional articles tick every box on the "tedious" agenda.
The best part is, the article is about "no thanks" to Kubernetes, which I wholeheartedly agree with and have stuck to commenting relevantly to the topic, backed up by plenty of citations.
Perhaps those articles are tedious, but that's changing the subject. The point is that users who show up to grind the same axe in thread after thread are lowering the signal/noise ratio of the site, so we moderate them, and ban them if they won't stop.
It's not so much an axe to grind as it is a fight for better working conditions. If you had to go look for a job, and all everbody ran is this shitty Kubernetes and Docker, how would you feel being forced to work with that when you knew something better is available, but you couldn't find a job using it because everyone runs Linux, Docker and Kubernetes, because they don't know any better? How would you raise awareness about better alternatives with the goal of creating better working conditions and better jobs?
I mentioned our talk to my coworker, his immediate response was "does he work for Oracle?"
I'm only half seriously asking but, do you? (Given the certifications you mentioned, I think that even if you don't, there is a vague subjective case that you do...)
I apologise, I thought that was a fair question and civil...
The missing context from another comment was:
> ... amount of institutional inertia I've come up against while trying to get any part of our Development or Production stack shifted over to Kubernetes, which I consider myself fairly expert in, I think you'd understand that "containers on Solaris" is not going to go over any better for me than containers on GNU/Linux,
Both SmartOS and GNU/Linux are open platforms, so it really wasn't fair of me to accuse a person of shilling for Oracle. I think I understand.
(That wasn't my intention, but if you read it that way, that's my mistake.)
You didn't accuse me of working for Oracle; your coworker implied it, but it also shows how little she or he is versed in the subject matter: the very reason top Solaris kernel engineers work at Joyent is that they vehemently oppose the Oracle corporation; it's that same reason why OpenSolaris was forked into illumos, from which SmartOS is built. Please let your coworker know my answer.
That is the answer I was looking for. And also shows what I know, as I just learned that SmartOS is not the same as OpenSolaris. (Thanks!)
> I‘m against object oriented programming.
I just went back and read your profile again. Just wondering, what do you support instead? (At a guess I'd say functional programming?)
I've often heard and suspected for myself after gaining some "industry experience" that the Object-Oriented principles taken by themselves without a strong lead designer who is vocal about (his or her) strong opinions and willing to call out bloated, poorly thought-out designs... will simply tend toward generating a Big Ball of Mud, or "Shanty-town" code.
Is this generally how you feel about the subject? I think we'd probably get along well and I'd certainly like to hear from you again.
I'm against object oriented programming because the code written in that way is needlessly complex and unmaintainable. Experience taught me that procedural, respectively the functional approach produce code which is easy to understand and therefore debug and maintain.
> he doesn't have the slightest clue what k8s does, but is completely certain that smartos somehow does "the same thing" better.
I stand by this statement. You don't have any idea what k8s does.
If you actually cared about convincing people that you don't need k8s and smartos is better, you'd write your own article describing in detail how you can easily use smartos for running personal projects on a 3 node cluster. Put up or shut up. YOU are nothing but hype.
"If you actually cared about convincing people that you don't need k8s and smartos is better, you'd write your own article describing in detail how you can easily use smartos for running personal projects on a 3 node cluster."
How about you read the documentation, where it's already documented? You know, that thing called manual pages? On illumos-based operating systems we have manual pages which are actually useful. With detailed examples in the EXAMPLES section! And lots of them! So, how about you "warm up the chair" and read some docs for a change? Thanks. If you need some pointers, I can help you where to start.
"Put up or shut up."
You or anyone else may not tell me what to do, nor will I listen to you unless I feel like it. Which I don't.
...and that's just a small, tiny sampling of what can be done, most of it doable across datacenters with Triton. With SmartOS, one virtualizes datacenters.
"seriously where do you go when you need SmartOS support?"
To read the comprehensive manual pages, then fire up DTrace, then mdb, then to the SmartOS mailing list, and if I want professional support, I pay Joyent, like I'd pay redhat, SuSE, or Canonical.
I'm a computer science major with formal education and certification in Solaris. Those tests were notoriously difficult to pass. I know C. I know UNIX. I know how to program. I know how to debug. I know how to administer UNIX systems, I know how to design physical servers from the ground up, everything someone system engineering large scale systems needs. How much support could I need with such excellent and comprehensive manual pages with lots of examples in them?
"The Kubernetes slack community has over 48,000 members and nearly 1000 are online right now"
...maybe that should tell you how "simple" Kubernetes is then, unless they're all there to grill smores, hang out and sing "Kumbayah"?
So, am I understanding correctly that this is a virtualization solution? Isn't that not the same thing at all? Virtualization has a lot of overhead, and that would be my first concern, so can you address that?
(My platform team balked at me when I suggested OpenShift, because they had it confused/thought I was talking about OpenStack, and they didn't want to incur the overhead of a virtualization layer. It wasn't until I said for the fifth time that it's a container solution and does not require any virtualization, that they actually tuned back in and stopped asking what hypervisor it used.)
My point is not that I couldn't use it, but that again, we're not talking about the same ballpark. A virtualization solution is not a containers solution. Wait. Wait wait... I'm wrong, aren't I? From a quick google, it looks like Solaris Zones are almost exactly like containers in this way. So this actually does both, huh?
> maybe that should tell you how "simple" Kubernetes is then, unless they're all there to grill smores
I told you in my first post, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Kubernetes isn't simple, there is some learning curve, but that once you get over it, you are actually over it.
Can you honestly say there is no learning curve to SmartOS?
> I'm a computer science major with formal education and certification in Solaris. ... How much support could I need with such excellent and comprehensive manual pages with lots of examples in them?
I'll take that as a "no". And from what you're saying, it sounds like there is actually no community slack? I don't believe you; come on, where do you go to gripe when you find something stupid? I've seen some projects that appear to only use Github, but when you dig a little deeper, they also have a Slack or some other community organizing platforms where you can reach a person who also uses the software like you do, without an established billing relationship (often times right away) and simply ask about their experiences.
Maybe it's an IRC channel? Maybe you are all consummate professionals and just use mailing lists, but I am skeptical of that.
" A virtualization solution is not a containers solution. Wait. Wait wait... I'm wrong, aren't I? From a quick google, it looks like Solaris Zones are almost exactly like containers in this way."
Yes, and they are true containers: fully functional UNIX servers, running at the speed of bare metal, because the OS is virtualized and not the hardware. I was running zones back in 2006 when project Kevlar first came out. Few months later we were running eight 4GB Oracle database instances in a single T2000 server, each database inside of one zone... GNU/Linux didn't even know what a container was yet, and wouldn't for several years...
Yes there's an IRC channel. Don't remember what it is. I've never needed to go there. I pop up on the SmartOS mailing list every few years to ask not a technical, but an architectural question. That's about it.
"Maybe you are all consummate professionals and just use mailing lists, but I am skeptical of that."
A lot of us are professional system and/or kernel engineers or architects, yes. Many of us are freelancers and consultants. Most of us are true engineers, with university degrees in engineering. But there are a lot of newcomers too, especially from ISP's, where SmartOS is a popular hosting solution for infrastructure and customers. The kind of stuff that has to work and has to be unbreakable because it's making money.
Well I work in higher-ed IT, where we don't make money sheepish grin and if I told you the amount of institutional inertia I've come up against while trying to get any part of our Development or Production stack shifted over to Kubernetes, which I consider myself fairly expert in, I think you'd understand that "containers on Solaris" is not going to go over any better for me than containers on GNU/Linux, a kernel and platform that we already support broadly.
I appreciate you engaged in good faith and got a lot of downvotes; I responded because I have had a serious problem here getting the institutional support for a modern devops stack (I've got a CS degree myself, but I mostly don't work on infrastructure, separation of duties and all that... I am a software developer in an environment where "buy not build" is the number one advice)
So when I see a stack mentioned that I haven't delved into before, I tend to want to know more about it. Like I said, thanks for humoring me and explaining.
We actually got a one-node Kubernetes instance stood up which I was able to trivially install Helm and Jenkins onto through the stable Jenkins chart for Helm. We use it now every day for our CI to build and test our internal apps.
That Jenkins server took about a day to get together, and maybe a week to get it nailed down with ansible roles so that it would be reproducible.
Even if I had more control over these decisions, I can't see ever switching to SmartOS unless it had a vibrant packaging community and management system like Helm charts and kubeapps. That story is more than half of the value proposition for me. The other half is sleeping at night, and I'm glad you have that worked out ;-)
Another example, the other day I wanted to spin up WordPress so I could try out this novel plugin made by some friends of mine; I haven't run a Php app in years and I forget how to go about setting that up, and I definitely wasn't running a MySQL server any time in the last 3 years, so you can see this is getting to be non-trivial even if it sounds like it should not be.
Well Bitnami has contributed a WordPress and MariaDB chart to the stable charts repo, so it was about 5 minutes of effort to get this stood up in a production-ready style. (I wouldn't call it production ready exactly, but only because it took about 5 minutes to do, and I barely reviewed it at all before I was up and running, ready to install the plugin and give it a go.)
The MariaDB charts are certainly production grade, with persistent volumes hosted in a StatefulSet and easily configurable scaling with replication, again built to be as opaque and easy to deploy whole-cloth if desired for a configurer.
(edit: OK, but seriously I went looking, and sure enough... SmartOS has a documented path to install both WordPress and Jenkins. I guess I need to find some new examples...)
I'm telling you this because I disagree that Kubernetes is not an orchestrator; if you count Helm it is most certainly capable of orchestrating complex workloads.
I'm not trying to convert you, but I am trying to show that K8S has got some advantages that you can't easily recreate in SmartOS, and to emphasize again that for many of us, it's all about the community!
"I can't see ever switching to SmartOS unless it had a vibrant packaging community"
SmartOS has close to 15,000 packages and growing[1], because it uses NetBSD's pkgsrc, which is also used by FreeBSD. Since the Joyent engineer responsible for this is also a pkgsrc developer, pkgsrc now has full upstream support for illumos / Solaris based operating systems. It also means that SmartOS has full access to FreeBSD's software library, which is a wealth of software: unless it's Linux kernel specific or extremely badly written, pretty much anything you can imagine on GNU/Linux is available on SmartOS. For those few isolated cases of badly written software, one can always run a Linux (lx) branded zone inside of SmartOS at bare metal speed[2][3].
...but I would be beholden to GNU/Linux and have to do the same thing I do with SmartOS in a far more complex way, built on an operating system substrate which cannot provide the reliability that I need to be able to sleep through my nights without an incident.
Kubernetes, Docker, Linux are a time sink that I can never get back, on things which Solaris solved far better and reliably 20 years ago. I don't want to go from a Pegasus to a donkey.