Project-FiFo cloud orchestration adds FreeBSD support

Project-FiFo cloud orchestration adds FreeBSD support(blog.project-fifo.net)

81 points by ipalreadytaken 8 years ago | 21 comments

X86BSD 8 years ago |

This is a huge boon for both SmartOS and FreeBSD. Furthering collaboration between the two. This is such a great piece of work that is such a great fit on FreeBSD. The community will love this and appreciate all the hard work dumped into this. It even has the Linuxulator (Linux binary compatibility) working for FreeBSD jails! Woo!!

Absolutely fantastic work by the fifo folks! Just stellar! The future is bright.

Annatar 8 years ago | |

FreeBSD and Illumos have always seemed to be good friends rather than competitors in the operating system landscape. Not only do you rarely hear something bad said about the other from the communities, but there is a healthy level of respect and cross-pollination going on.
...

It is refreshing to see such cooperation in an otherwise extremely competitive field. This fantastic attitude inspires us.

We are truly lucky and blessed to have the people in the FreeBSD community as friends.

It is a great time to be a part of both communities and have such advanced techologies at our collective disposal.

The future is bright indeed. There are no two platforms I’d rather be on than SmartOS and FreeBSD. Thank you dear friends for everything you’ve done.

Licenser 8 years ago | | |

Agreed, the FreeBSD community has been incredibly welcoming despite differences in approach of some which is super refreshing compared to the "just do it that way we've always done it like that" you encounter in other places.

Licenser 8 years ago |

Hey I'm Heinz, if you have any questions feel free to ask.

rjzzleep 8 years ago | |

The documentation has been saying that the zones in 0.9.2 will no longer work in 0.9.3. Can I assume that 0.9.3 is now "stable"?

Besides the fact that I have "thin" root zone in SmartOS and the fact that there are still a lot more images available for SmartOS, what things are there which would make you choose one over the other?

EDIT: vmadm allows kvm zones, does freebsd vmadm support bhyve as well? or is that not really possible?

EDIT2: thank you for your work

ipalreadytaken 8 years ago | | |

0.9.3 Jails support has no foreseeable changes going forward as far as upgradability. 0.9.2 was Alpha support for BSD to see if there was any interest, once it was determined that there was interest we started looking at what it would take to have a stable implementation. One of the things we had to do was make a version of vmadm for FreeBSD which took a different approach than iocage (what we used in 0.9.2).

We are from a SmartOS background so of course we are biased to SmartOS, but there are software packages that work better on BSD, and it does have some interesting potential with wider hardware support.

Freebsd vmadm has jails, and lx jail support right now. We are looking at adding bhyve. It should not be a large task as we took a jail in a jail approach in order to have vnet support but still lock down in inner jail. This made adding lx jails a minimal task, and I expect bhyve to be no different.

Thanks for the compliments! We love FiFo and hope you do too!

hpcjoe 8 years ago | |

Great job Heinz and team!

Licenser 8 years ago | | |

Thanks mate :)

rdtsc 8 years ago | |

I noticed you used LeoFS for a storage layer. I've been following LeoFS for a while. Can you describe your experience with it and why you chose it, or any impression or thoughts about it.

Licenser 8 years ago | | |

Overall quite good, the system is very stable and the performance is good (probably not the fastest but decent).

The only thing to criticise (to a degree) would be that if the manual isn't followed precisely during the installation you can end up with a busted setup.

For why the choice. It's a solid distributed system, the concepts it uses the same principles as FiFo (masterless setup for high availability). Being written in Erlang means it works flawlessly on SmartOS and FreeBSD plus if you already use erlang gives the advantage to be able to look at the code if needed.

The LeoFS team is very quick to respond, works extremely diligent and takes their work serious (which is a big plus).

Even on the test system which gets brutally shut down (aka plugs pulled) about once or twice a week the installation works flawlessly even after a few month of this torment.

Of cause as always YMMV ;)

Timothycquinn 8 years ago |

Thanks for embracing FreeBSD. I too am a fan of Erlang, OTP, Elixir and virtual infrastructure. I hope to be using your stack in the coming months and hopefully can contribute back to your projects in some way.

Annatar 8 years ago |

I love how the already excellent software environment around SmartOS just keeps on evolving and expanding daily.

And Heinz, congratulations on sticking with illumos / SmartOS and taking a stand for what you believe in; I loved your talk from a few years ago.

Licenser 8 years ago | |

Thank you, friend! You have no idea how much some encouraging words can mean :)