This looks interesting, I'm still holding my breath to see if Joyent are going to bring zfs support to docker though. It looks like they're working on reviving lx branded zones instead which is a bit of a bummer as they are (or were) pretty terrible.
We have put (and are putting) a bunch of work into LX branded zones[1], and are at the point that they are working on an incredibly broad class of apps (64-bit and with on-the-metal performance). A concrete case in point: we recently ran the (amazing!) hundred language quine relay[2] in an LX branded 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04 zone on SmartOS.[3]
As for ZFS support and Docker, it will be via sdc-docker[4], our (emerging) end-point for the Docker Remote API. The progress there has been swift and everything is being done in the open; expect to see something in production from us in this first calendar quarter.
Am I right to assume then that there isn't going to be a SmartOS/SunOS 'docker' client which can understand zfs+zones / replace vmadm/zoneadm? I had planned on looking into writing this when they announced the 'new' pluggable architecture some while ago..
We don't plan to do such a thing, but we would (obviously) be supportive. The challenges for a Docker daemon on SmartOS are several-fold: first, while clearly sympathetic to cross-platform concerns, Docker itself isn't actually (yet) cross-platform, and many Linux-isms were found in putatively generic code. Second, the Docker daemon has a hard dependency on cgo, which is even nastier than Go itself to get working on non-Linux systems. (We did ultimately get cgo working on illumos -- albeit arguably at the cost of the sanity of the engineer who did the work.[1]) Finally, in terms of deploying this into production, we're not about to take third party code from anyone and run it in the global zone on production machines.
So for us, it makes much more sense to implement the Docker Remote API on top of SmartDataCenter, which has the added advantage of virtualizing the concept of a Docker host to be an entire datacenter. But again, we would be supportive of any effort to straight-up port Docker to SmartOS, and we are generally supportive of any container effort that is looking beyond the (mis)design of Linux containers (including the work linked to here for FreeBSD + ZFS).
Consider looking at Warden/Garden as alternative. The main backend currently is for Linux and uses some of the same stuff as Docker. But there's a Windows backend coming too and (hand-wavey gesture here) I imagine this means it was written fairly generically.
I would use this, I really would, but the problem I have with ZFS RAID-Z1 and 2 shares, once you setup the storage pool, you can't dynamically add hard drives to the pool, you have to set it up weirdly like RAIDZ-1+1. All I want to do is add more storage to my 5TB pool without having to wipe it all or change the configuration to something else because I want to add a hard drive.
I'm still working on a generalized system (not OS specific), with ZFS support in there and working. Have begun discussions about open sourcing this with management. In theory it will let people go 'show me this thing on <x> platform and <y> platform, benchmarked'. Platform strengths will then speak for themselves, and platform maintainers will have the same version/build/evaluate loop that regular service developers use. http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts/
There's also a WordPress plugin called "Jetpack". Both are so different areas, that I don't think it matters much. If it happens that either project is actually bothered by mine and reaches out to me, I'll be happy to talk.
I've checked for name conflicts in related areas, in package repositories (FreeBSD ports, Debian's and Ubuntu's archives), major open source hosting services, and haven't found anything related. Let me know if I missed anything relevant.
I'm the team lead of the Jetpack plugin for WordPress. I've passed it upstream to our in-house counsel just for a cursory review should it conflict with trademark scope or something.
(What do I know, I'm a dev, not one of those lawyer-types)
(But as the Mozilla Jetpack thing existed before we did, and we both coexist, I'm not expecting a kerfluffle, but who knows -- I am not a Lawyer!)
Thanks for taking care of that! Please let me know if your legal team finds anything wrong. If you need to contact me, either open a GitHub issue on the repo, or email me (maciej at 3ofcoins dot net).
I would be far more willing to entrust a production DB to a jail than a docker container because it's been audited over the course of >a decade. Furthermore, aboutthebsds is a well-known linux polemicist blog.
My main use of Docker is for making application deployment less painful. I've heard of a few people who say they're running their prod DBs under docker but I cannot begin to imagine how fucktarded you'd need to be to do this (unless they have some requirement to spin up lots and lots of short-lived dbs, and those dbs have very, very low storage performance requirements...)
I don't think that beginning your question with "I cannot begin to imagine how fucktarded you'd need to be to do this" is going to encourage people to answer that question…
That aside, my approach with Linux/Docker is to have a "fat" host system that is open to the outside world, terminates SSL, load balances and proxies the containers' services (nginx), and provides global services are either shared between containers (Postfix smarthosting to Sendgrid, DNS cache, rsyslog), or services that can manage user/service isolation well enough on their own (PostgreSQL). Containers run mostly applications, or services that I need in multiple instances or versions.
I do containerize Redis, as it can't be safely shared across multiple services (no privilege isolation, too easy for one service to DoS the other with a blocking operation), but then I don't consider Redis to be a database – it's rather a "shared state server", kind of a more sophisticated memcached.
However, I understand the approach of CoreOS, which minimizes role of the host OS. In this model, host's only role is to support containers, and every other process needs to be containerized. From this point of view, Postgres is an application. This way, I can flexibly run multiple version of Postgres, try to upgrade it without needing to set up separate host service, and so on. Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable with that, but I understand how it could be useful.
Regarding storage performance, database's data directory would need to be a volume anyway (to be able to upgrade database without trowing away the data). A volume is just a `mount --bind`, without any aufs layers, to any point of the filesystem, so it doesn't seem to me that i/o performance hit would be noticeable…
There's nothing wrong with jails. Its a robust technology that's been battle tested for a decade. They provide lots of awesome features that are useful for reasons other than security. In fact, the primary reason I use jails is not for security at all. And, AFAIK there are no exploits in the wild for jails. Like any containerization or virtualization technology there are theoretical holes. I'd stake a large sum of money that we see major vulnerabilities in LXC/Docker in the next 5 years, we just haven't because they haven't been around as long.
I'd love to see a source for just about anything that blog claims because it reads like FUD and contains some factual inaccuracies like chroot not being in FreeBSD by the time jails were added. It also doesn't seem to understand what the difference between the base and the kernel is in FreeBSD. Jails are implemented similarly to LXC/Docker by having a few syscalls in the kernal for namespace isolation and the bulk of the execution happening in userspace.
VPS seems to require VIMAGE, which currently is a no-go for me (I experience kernel panic on boot if I compile it in), and the second link… well… the tinfoil hat of the author's blog has to be impressive. I've tried to read this and some other rants (they pop up quite high in search results), and couldn't find any actual content or any sources for the statements.
Capsicum and rctl are definitely on my list of things to look into (especially capsicum, it seems to be enabled in the GENERIC kernel configuration).
