Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

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!

Have a great day, ^_^\/


"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].

[1] https://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/building-packages-at-scale.h...

[2] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/LX+Branded+Zones

[3] https://docs.joyent.com/sdc6/working-with-images/list-of-sup...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: