"As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend." And that's where I draw the line. Abusing the trust of your customers is an absolute no-no in my book.
> Abusing the trust of your customers is an absolute no-no in my book.
How do people on the Internet come to such random conclusions when there is no way you could have known the full terms of the contract between the author and their client?
I like the idea and would like to learn more, but it looks like "migrated stuff without testing ahead of time and it turned out faster for some reason". Was it the memory allocations? Was it the disk latency? The hypervisor? Could it be replicated by other means? It was a fun read, but the reasoning/understanding was missing. I hope people investigate deeper before making changes like that.
If you look for benchmarks comparing databases on Linux/BSDs you'll find lots of nuance in practice and results going both ways depending on configuration and what's being tested.
All is fine and dandy and BSDs can solve many use cases. Unfortunately for the solution we are working on, which imply many microservices we need Kubernetes and no BSD equivalent to Kubernetes exists.
I've helped build two top 10 service provider networks (10s of Tbps). One on FreeBSD, and one on Linux with Kubernetes. I don't really see Kubernetes as being a game changer. The biggest pro, it makes it easier to onboard both development and operations personnel having a quasi-standard for how a lot of things like scheduling and application networking work. But it also seems to come with a magnitude of accidental an…
Apart from a sober and common-sense thinking in your comment, I like the term "ornamental complexity" :)
"As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend." And that's where I draw the line. Abusing the trust of your customers is an absolute no-no in my book.
Not an abuse at all. I've a contract with those clients, and I can move the VMs, change the services, etc. freely as long as it doesn't cost more than the amount we've previously set. Otherwise, I'd never dare to do something like that.
It's still something that's weird to do without notifying the customers. What if things were slower? What if bsd introduced some slight change in behaviour that messed up their data but they didn't know when/why things changed? Full control doesn't mean unexpected YOLO changes are welcome.
I use Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all for fun, learning, and profit(the first two). At the very least it is nice to make acquaintance with at least one BSD because it will probably expand your knowledge on Linux in ways you wont be able to anticipate. For example, FreeBSD got me into kernel development, full system debugging, network stack development, driver development, and understanding how the whole kit f…
What sort of projects did you do to get into network stack and driver development on BSD?
I use Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all for fun, learning, and profit(the first two). At the very least it is nice to make acquaintance with at least one BSD because it will probably expand your knowledge on Linux in ways you wont be able to anticipate. For example, FreeBSD got me into kernel development, full system debugging, network stack development, driver development, and understanding how the whole kit f…
> tend to use FreeBSD because in many ways it is simpler and less surprising, especially when accounting for the passage of time. ifconfig is still ifconfig, and it works great. rc.d is all I need for my own stuff.
That sounds very appealing to me. I have to keep a small number of servers running, but its not my main focus and I would like to spend as little time on it as possible.
I have started using Alpine Linux for servers (not for my desktop, yet) because it is light and simple. Maybe BSD will be the next step.
Not an abuse at all. I've a contract with those clients, and I can move the VMs, change the services, etc. freely as long as it doesn't cost more than the amount we've previously set. Otherwise, I'd never dare to do something like that.
It's still something that's weird to do without notifying the customers. What if things were slower? What if bsd introduced some slight change in behaviour that messed up their data but they didn't know when/why things changed? Full control doesn't mean unexpected YOLO changes are welcome.
As specified in several parts, the tests were conducted while maintaining and using BSD-based infrastructures for over 20 years. In some cases, Linux was used for various reasons (commercial, ideological, because they were inherited infrastructures managed by others, etc.), but the results were anticipated. I did not expect a performance degradation, and in any case, having set up the systems in a mirrored environment, there was always the possibility to revert in a few minutes.
I like the idea and would like to learn more, but it looks like "migrated stuff without testing ahead of time and it turned out faster for some reason". Was it the memory allocations? Was it the disk latency? The hypervisor? Could it be replicated by other means? It was a fun read, but the reasoning/understanding was missing. I hope people investigate deeper before making changes like that. If you look for benchmarks…
No, after 20 years of use and comparative testing of similar setups. Frankly, I have always placed little importance on benchmarks as I consider them extremely specific. I am interested in real-world use cases.
The goal of the talk and the article is not to urge people to migrate all their setups, but simply to share my experience and the results achieved. To encourage the use of BSDs for their own purposes as well. It’s not to say that they are the best solution; there is no universal solution to all problems, but having a range of choices can only be positive.