Comment by kelseyhightower | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelseyhightower | Hacker News Reader

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kelseyhightower

It's true, the CoreOS team has been moving really fast. It's what startups have to do in the beginning -- before the money runs out :). While our announcement today introduces Tectonic and some funding, it also communicates that we have found our market fit. This means we have the right set of features to go to market with, and add value by making people successful with containers.

Now it's all about execution.

CoreOS is now focused on balancing new features with maturity and stability. For many of our projects this focus started almost a year ago. Take etcd for example. CoreOS spent the last 9 months effectively rewriting etcd and it's raft implementation to meet the stability requirements we need going forward. Other projects have demonstrated great signs of stability such as CoreOS Linux, our Linux OS focused on containers. It's not perfect, but there are many people that run CoreOS Linux in production today. We expect this trend to continue.

I should also note that we have many more team members employed by CoreOS than we did a year ago. It takes time to build the right team, but so far I think we have done a fantastic job. I'm still amazed at the number of projects we actively maintain and ship with a team our size. Now we have the people power to make our projects/products solid.

Thanks for raising the question and hopefully we can continue to answer it with actions and shipping products that you will fall in love with -- or at least get the job done without the pager going off.

> CoreOS spent the last 9 months effectively rewriting etcd and it's raft implementation to meet the stability requirements we need going forward.

Yeah, I noticed that. It almost seems like it would have been better to just glom on to Zookeeper or some other directory service that was a bit more established, just for the sake of being able to work on other things for the last 9 months. Do you ever look back in retrospect on that?

The reality is that etcd is still probably a year or 2 away from being production ready.

In the mean time Zookeeper has shipped dynamic ensemble configuration which bring parity to the only thing etcd had any advantage in. (Not that it -really- mattered, most people that were running dynamic ensembles were already using Netflix's Exhibitor)

Zookeeper is also faster, has more features and you need it anyway if you are running SolrCloud, Mesos, Hadoop etc.

Zookeeper definitely has some advantages both in terms of maturity and features.

I'm not sure though that Zookeeper is universally faster than etcd (certainly as you add nodes it slows down... though most people don't need more than 3 or 5 nodes).

Dynamic ensemble configuration is definitely a place where Zookeeper was lacking before, but it isn't the only difference that matters. The big difference I remember with etcd was partition tolerance. Last I checked Zookeeper was all on the consistency side and it's partition tolerance basically just wrote off the smaller partition. Either choice can be a good thing or a bad thing for a directory/orchestration store, but particularly as you scale up to large numbers, partition tolerance semantics seem to better match the use cases.

So I don't think etcd is all inferior to Zookeeper, and I understand the desire to build a system where all components are fundamentally AP, but sometimes having a bit of impurity and some duct tape hackery in your model can help you get out the door faster and focus on more significant technical challenges that will help you build your community. Once you have a community, you have more resources to address that duct tape.

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