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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

That’s the thing. I am a long time BSD fan, grew up with it an even tan FreeBSD on the desktop for years. But then came the cloud, docker, kubernetes, and the whole shebang, and it simply does not make sense to even consider hosting applications on FreeBSD again if you are deploying a modern stack.

Yes, of course, there are ways around that, but it just doesn’t make economical sense for most organizations.

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I know this might hit a nerve for some. I agree with the limitations of FreeBSD compared to Linux.

I run a research cluster, and here’s how I built it.

Firewall+DNS= OpenBSD(pf)

File server(NFS) = FreeBSD (ZFS)

Compute nodes = Fedora latest with some optimizations.

Identity provider = CentOS( FreeIPA)

Database server = CentOS(Postgres)

Web servers = CentOS podman(nginx)

FreeBSD for ZFS fileserver has been solid and dependable like nothing I have ever worked with before - it is hard to believe that it is free in cost and open source. I probably would not even think about running FreeBSD for compute nodes because it is not its thing.... almost all research software in the wild are being written with Linux in mind.

Colin Percival (creator of Tarsnap) runs FreeBSD on AWS (discussed here on HN several times). More info:

https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-12-26-the-many-ways-to...

Sure you can run FreeBSD on AWS, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. A modern stack orchestrates containers on a higher level, using kubernetes, nomad, or something similar. I’m having a hard time seeing how FreeBSD could fit into this type of architecture.

Well, I would argue that it still makes sense, depending on what you want to achieve: world-top networking performance? FreeBSD. 1st class ZFS support? FreeBSD. Not being vulnerable to widespread Linux exploits (Shellshock, for example)? FreeBSD. And the list could go on.

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