Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

conradresearch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 54 posts

Re: Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

#31

Post by baq »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #13
IgorPartola wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never find arguments like this compelling (but I agree with your sentiment). I don’t much care to fire up the time machine to go back 12 or more years to develop software today. If your argument is that ZFS and jails provide the same functionality but are more stable than Docker. But as is it comes off as “get off my lawn you young whipper snappers”. But at the same time, the reason Docker won was not because it wa…

I think it also helps that Docker started with an enormous amount of VC funding because their promise was to bring the “App Store” to Linux and enterprise servers. Who couldn’t become famous with something like a $200M budget? Feel like they spent it on marketing instead. Podman is arguably technically superior yet people stay with Docker out of habit…

Docker engine is one thing, but access to docker hub without rate limits is what people actually pay for if they’re too cheap to host their own proxy registry (which everyone except the smallest companies should regardless).

Re: Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

#32

Post by Arch-TK »

IgorPartola wrote: post #8
ssl-3 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. ZFS has been stable in FreeBSD for something like 17 years, and FreeBSD jails have been around for something like 25 years. By the time Docker hit 1.0 (about 11 years ago), the use of snapshots and jails had already been normal parts of life in the FreeBSD space for over half of a decade.

I never find arguments like this compelling (but I agree with your sentiment). I don’t much care to fire up the time machine to go back 12 or more years to develop software today. If your argument is that ZFS and jails provide the same functionality but are more stable than Docker. But as is it comes off as “get off my lawn you young whipper snappers”. But at the same time, the reason Docker won was not because it wa…

You can't use Docker on Mac or FreeBSD. Now, I am not calling you a liar, you _can_ use Docker on Mac and FreeBSD. But you would probably only want to do so for development, as Docker on Mac and FreeBSD requires running a Linux VM which is the thing which _actually_ runs the containers.

There is work ongoing to try to make this more native on FreeBSD (by using Linux jails) but that work is not complete yet.

So, if you want to get the same kind of experience as Docker on FreeBSD, you are forced to use jails.

The only reason Docker seems accessible is because it's native to the platform people seem to like for running all their services, but if you're dealing with FreeBSD, you most certainly would not just "use Docker" to deploy your stuff. Because you would get worse performance than if you had just used Linux.

So the answer to "Isn't this just Docker with extra steps?" is truly and absolutely "No". Not because of some kind of old man shouting at cloud argument, but because if you are on FreeBSD (for whatever reason that might be) you can't just use Docker as an easier replacement for Jails (at least right now).

Re: Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

#33

Post by oldpersonintx2 »

Arch-TK wrote: post #32
IgorPartola wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never find arguments like this compelling (but I agree with your sentiment). I don’t much care to fire up the time machine to go back 12 or more years to develop software today. If your argument is that ZFS and jails provide the same functionality but are more stable than Docker. But as is it comes off as “get off my lawn you young whipper snappers”. But at the same time, the reason Docker won was not because it wa…

You can't use Docker on Mac or FreeBSD. Now, I am not calling you a liar, you _can_ use Docker on Mac and FreeBSD. But you would probably only want to do so for development, as Docker on Mac and FreeBSD requires running a Linux VM which is the thing which _actually_ runs the containers. There is work ongoing to try to make this more native on FreeBSD (by using Linux jails) but that work is not complete yet. So, if yo…

[dead]

Re: Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

#34

Post by righthand »

If you want to do this kind of thing but don’t like the looks of this indepth tutorial, I highly reccomend installing Bastille FreeBSD instead and let the bastille tooling do the heavy lifting of managing zpool cloning and what not. Their getting started tutorial should get you 90% of the way there and has Docker like tooling. [0]

Also found this self host on a Raspberry Pi helpful.[1]

[0] https://bastillebsd.org/getting-started/

[1] https://www.sharpwriting.net/project/bastille-jail-managemen...

Re: Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

#36

Post by righthand »

toast0 wrote: post #23
stingraycharles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I would love to use FreeBSD jails with ZFS and everything, it’s just that the whole cloud and containerization thing happened based on Linux and FreeBSD just never made it into that ecosystem. You’ll be sacrificing a lot and have to hand-roll a lot if you want your organization to switch from Linux+docker to FreeBSD+jails

I think there's FreeBSD images for all the clouds now. You would need to do more work yourself to fetch and run jails probably, and I don't know if there's a hosted repository of 'jail images', but in return, you'd probably have a nicer system (at least, I'd like such a system more than running containers on google container optimized linux)

Bastille has “templates”: https://bastillebsd.org/templates/

Re: Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

#37

Post by TacticalCoder »

pacija wrote: post #29
soupbowl wrote: post #3

For those unfamiliar with FreeBSD, this is using base OS tools to manually create this type of immutable jail/container. This can be done with 'less effort' by using a jail manager.

Jail managers come and go. Base OS tools stay and are getting better and better. I would definitely stay away from ezjail as it us quite old, active development or even maintenance has stopped long time ago. Author of the article seem to know what they are doing so I'm puzzled why they don't use `bsdinstall jail /path/to/jail` to implement basejail instead of manually unpacking archives. No need for separate custom r…

[dead]

Re: Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

#38

Post by badgersnake »

toast0 wrote: post #23
stingraycharles wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I would love to use FreeBSD jails with ZFS and everything, it’s just that the whole cloud and containerization thing happened based on Linux and FreeBSD just never made it into that ecosystem. You’ll be sacrificing a lot and have to hand-roll a lot if you want your organization to switch from Linux+docker to FreeBSD+jails

I think there's FreeBSD images for all the clouds now. You would need to do more work yourself to fetch and run jails probably, and I don't know if there's a hosted repository of 'jail images', but in return, you'd probably have a nicer system (at least, I'd like such a system more than running containers on google container optimized linux)

Not Hetzner, sadly.

Re: Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

#39

Post by cyphar »

nesarkvechnep wrote: post #24

I hope OCI containers support make this boilerplate obsolete.

FYI, we just merged FreeBSD jail support into the OCI runtime spec v1.3[1]. There is already at least one implementation of it[2] as well.

[1]: https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec/pull/1286 [2]: https://github.com/samuelkarp/runj

Re: Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

#40

Post by cyphar »

perrygeo wrote: post #17
IgorPartola wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never find arguments like this compelling (but I agree with your sentiment). I don’t much care to fire up the time machine to go back 12 or more years to develop software today. If your argument is that ZFS and jails provide the same functionality but are more stable than Docker. But as is it comes off as “get off my lawn you young whipper snappers”. But at the same time, the reason Docker won was not because it wa…

Docker was the first viable containerization technology on Linux. Despite the 15 year late start vs FreeBSD Jails, it's certainly winning by the numbers. But that has nothing to do with their respective UXs. It's a Linux vs FreeBSD signal.

Not really, OpenVZ was/is really quite good, it was just hampered by the fact it requires out of tree modules. LXC has also always been very usable (Docker even used it for several years) but it was IMHO too focused on the VM-like management scheme that Zones and Jails had.

Docker's killer selling point was that it solved a very common and specific developer problem, not that it provided operational improvements over the state of the art on Linux. From an operational perspective, Docker has generally been a downgrade compared to LXC. (I say this as a maintainer of runc, the container runtime that underpins Docker, and as someone who worked a lot on Docker back in the early days and somewhat less today.)

Post reply on HN