There seems to be a lot of odd nostalgia for Solaris in the comments here and on twitter. I think that's missing the point of the article.
Yes, Oracle Solaris is dead. But illumos is better, open source, alive and here to stay.
You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones.
It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already.
As illumos is only the basic building block of the operating system (but unlike linux includes kernel + basic userland) one usually runs one of the distributions:
- SmartOS, developed by Joyent as a cloud hypervisor. Supports zones, KVM and lx-branded linux containers. [1]
- OmniOS CE, a minimal distribution targeted for bare metal server installations [2]
- OpenIndiana, similar to the traditional opensolaris. If you care about GUI this is probably the one. [3]
- Tribblix, modern components with retro style [4]
Sure, the user base is smaller than Linux. But that is also true for FreeBSD which is used by Netflix and Whatsapp.
Running a different OS than most other people can give your company an advantage and I know that ZFS and zones have done that for mine.
[1] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS
[2] http://www.omniosce.org
[3] https://www.openindiana.org
[4] http://www.tribblix.org
You can use illumos today, right now, and have your ZFS, mdb, DTrace and zones. It really is open source and we're a community using and improving it. For 7 years now already.
As illumos is only the basic building block of the operating system (but unlike linux includes kernel + basic userland) one usually runs one of the distributions:
- SmartOS, developed by Joyent as a cloud hypervisor. Supports zones, KVM and lx-branded linux containers. [1]
- OmniOS CE, a minimal distribution targeted for bare metal server installations [2]
- OpenIndiana, similar to the traditional opensolaris. If you care about GUI this is probably the one. [3]
- Tribblix, modern components with retro style [4]
Sure, the user base is smaller than Linux. But that is also true for FreeBSD which is used by Netflix and Whatsapp. Running a different OS than most other people can give your company an advantage and I know that ZFS and zones have done that for mine.
[1] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Download+SmartOS
[2] http://www.omniosce.org
[3] https://www.openindiana.org
[4] http://www.tribblix.org