
Farewell, Solaris - francesca
https://engineering.mongodb.com/post/farewell-solaris
======
alyson-cabral
I'm one of the Product Managers at MongoDB and I was a part of making this
decision. It seems like there are two main areas where people are asking for
more information: 1) exactly what are the numbers of Solaris downloads and 2)
what about security patches of existing versions? I'm happy to clarify those
points here and we will be posting an update to the blog to include this
information.

Based on the data we have, about 0.06% (and decreasing) of MongoDB users are
running on Solaris. In addition, as Andrew mentioned in the blog, all of our
customers have either deprecated Solaris or have told us they plan to
deprecate it.

In regards to security patches on Solaris, we will continue to fix critical
flaws for the community, regardless of where found or how reported. Anyone can
report a security vulnerability by using our Security project
([https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SECURITY](https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SECURITY))
to create an account then a ticket describing the vulnerability.

~~~
SoMisanthrope
It was the right decision, @alyson-cabral. The major market is linux-based,
correct? There are better uses of company assets, than trying to chase the
less-than-0.06% of holdouts that operate Solaris.

As a person of science, I've used both Sun Solaris and SGI Irix.... time to
let go of that past and pivot to the future!

~~~
unethical_ban
You're shadowbanned.

------
cyphar
> The future of Oracle Solaris, perhaps the one true Solaris if you had to
> pick one, is murky at best.

I believe the article linked talking about "the death of Oracle Solaris" was
shown to be FUD and over-zealous reporting, but ignoring that I don't see why
you would think Oracle no-longer-open-Solaris would be the "one true Solaris
if you had to pick one". illumos gained the majority of the development
community from Oracle after the majority of the Solaris developers left, and
most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS,
Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos.

~~~
spankweasel
> ... most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace,
> ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos.

As a core Solaris dev at Oracle, I can tell you that's not true. I just can't
prove it to you. :-(

~~~
PopsiclePete
Without confirming or denying anything, can you allude, vaguely, and super
non-committally, that Oracle, who may or may not be your boss, cares about
Solaris?

~~~
spankweasel
Yes. No.

Maybe.

:-|

------
jcadam
I'll admit to running Solaris on my desktop many years ago when it was still
under Sun's stewardship. It was the most accessible 'real' UNIX for most
people (being that it was free and able to run on x86). I also once had a job
working on an old Ada codebase that had us stuck on SPARC/Solaris 8 (in the
late 2000s :O). It makes me sad to see what Oracle has done to it.

In any case, I suspect most users looking for a more 'authentic' UNIX flavor
than Linux have shifted over to *BSD (My home file server runs FreeBSD --
mostly for the ZFS support -- hey, at least a file system from Solaris-land
will live on).

~~~
busterarm
I have fond memories of Solaris, but I'm pretty much on OpenBSD for good these
days. It's really head-and-shoulders above anything else available these days,
IMO. The closest alternative that I'd find acceptable might be Arch, but gosh,
systemd is one of those things that just make me hate running systems.

~~~
stutonk
You should have a look at Void Linux[1] (if you ever wanted to give Linux
another shot). It uses runit for init instead of systemd and offers musl as an
actively supported alternative to glibc. Its package manager is similar to the
one in Arch in that it provides both rolling-release binary packages as well
as a ports-style build system. Void also incorporates OpenBSD's LibreSSL by
default. Everything else is kept as minimal and simple as possible.

1) [https://www.voidlinux.eu/](https://www.voidlinux.eu/)

~~~
busterarm
Very cool efforts. I will look into this as an alternative to some of our
production systems where we've had to use Ubuntu instead of OpenBSD (for
support of certain stacks).

------
cpeterso
It's ironic that ecosystem fragmentation is now a legitimate reason to drop
Solaris when fragmentation had for a long time been a major concern for
supporting Linux.

------
bogomipz
Interesting that one of the reasons for their dropping Solaris support is
"Operational difficulties." The same would also be valid reason for saying
"Farewell" to Mongodb.

Anyone that's had to manage a MongoDB database could tell you about regularly
having to manually re-synch their secondaries, manually having to run
compactions to manage disk space(the power of 2 allocator), the automatic
"balancer" process that sends I/O the roof, the rollback files etc. I think
MongoDB being so operationally difficult is the prime reason that MongoDB
offers a managed MongoDB PaaS offering.

~~~
peterwwillis
Isn't every similar database a pain to support?

~~~
bogomipz
What databases are similar to MongoDB either architecturally, storage engine
or data model?

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redm
I have a lot of nostalgia for Solaris and Irix circa 2000. They had their uses
and places, especially when coupled with SGI and Sun hardware. I think mostly
the reason its nostalgic is that it reminds me of a "golden age" (late 1970's
to mid-1990's?) of accessible computing when computers were still the domain
of nerds.

~~~
pjmlp
Me too, because Solaris, Irix and NeXTSTEP were the only UNIXes that had
attempts to be something better than just XWIndows on top of POSIX.

------
pharaohgeek
Solaris has, historically, been my favorite operating system. I started using
it when Sun made Solaris 7 available for free to anyone who requested it when
I was in college. I still remember receiving a package in the mail with a nice
set of packaged CDs and documentation! My college had standardized on Unix for
development for homework assignments, and Linux at the time still seemed
"immature" to me. I loved the stability and sanity I found with Solaris, and
even saved up money to beef up my home PC so that it could run better (SCSI
hard drives, more RAM, etc.) I used it up through version 10, but once Oracle
took control and de-open-sourced it, I knew that was the beginning of the end.

------
kev009
Anyone smart enough to use SmartOS is not dumb enough to use MongoDB so
nothing was lost.

------
jsiepkes
Meanwhile in the comment section of this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15124306](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15124306)
HackerNews MongoDB article basically everyone (who speaks up at least) seems
to agree that the drawbacks of NoSQL outweigh the benefits.

------
symlinkk
I wish they gave actual numbers on how few people were downloading Solaris
builds.

~~~
SwellJoe
Our numbers aren't comparable to MongoDB, but when we dropped support for
Solaris in Virtualmin a few years ago, we had a couple dozen active Solaris
installations left (and we had maybe 75,000 active installations on Linux at
that time), only a couple of which were paying customers. At its peak, it was
never more than a few thousand Solaris installations (and most of those were
because Joyent installed Virtualmin GPL on their containers, and they also
used it for shared hosting on Solaris before that, by default, but when they
shifted their business model those disappeared).

I don't know anything about MongoDB usage, but I do know Solaris/Illumos is a
tiny blip on the radar of usage in web dev and web hosting. We just don't hear
about it at all. I think we still get Solaris bug reports and patches every
now and then, like once or twice a year, for Webmin on Solaris (which is still
supported in a "we won't intentionally break it" sort of way and Jamie still
builds Solaris packages), but even that's very rare, and Webmin has a million
or so installations.

The biggest factor for me wasn't the raw number, it was simply that usage was
shrinking rapidly. You can't reasonably devote a bunch of effort to
maintaining support for an OS that has a small number of users today and will
have half as many in a year. Software is a bet on returns with interest; I'm
betting that putting in weeks of effort to support a new OS (or Linux distro,
or platform, or web server, or language, or whatever) will keep paying for
months or years. There's no way to count Solaris usage that I'm aware of that
doesn't show it being smaller next year.

That's unfortunate, perhaps; there's a lot of cool stuff in Solaris (and
Illumos). But, market forces aren't sentimental and Linux is a juggernaut that
rolls over everything in its path and consumes the best features (and some of
the bad features too) of everything it touches. It's funny that the old wisdom
of Microsoft being like the Borg and Linux being a scrappy upstart has kinda
turned on its end. Linux now absorbs the best of other operating systems and
just keeps multiplying and spreading into more and more markets from mobile to
big iron.

------
hyperrail
What happens when security vulnerabilities are patched in a supported version
of MongoDB? Will Solaris users simply never get those patches? The blog
doesn't say that I could see.

~~~
jlgaddis
> _Existing release artifacts for Solaris will continue to be made available,
> but no new releases will be issued, barring a critical issue raised under an
> existing support contract covering MongoDB versions 3.0 through 3.4 running
> on Solaris._

Sounds like those with a support contract can get a patch/update. I suppose
everyone else is SOL.

~~~
angus-prune
I read that as that they'll only work on issues raised under support contract,
but would release the fixes to everyone.

~~~
metheus
See Aly's top-level comment re: patches and download numbers.

------
rodgerd
Unsurprising. As far as I can see Solaris is pretty much retreating into being
in the same position as zOS (MVS): something Oracle ship with the integrated
hardware stacks.

