As I've seen it described here before (by Brendan Gregg ?) Netflix uses FreeBSD for the CDN servers (streaming the video), and Linux for everything else, browsing Netflix, encoding, etc.
That's true, although he was right about the Linux counterparts. Reading this migration guide, at least to me, it seems that all Linux replacements for things like dtrace, ZFS, SMF, zones... are just subpar.
So I got a different vibe. I can't speak to how good all that stuff is in Linux vs Solaris (or BSD) so it's just a vibe. The feeling I got was it was someone who was extracting the best value out of the system he was using.
Which is refreshing, the constant whining about Linux vs $SOMEONES_FAVORITE_OS gets old. Very pleasant to have a "just the facts" pile of info. And I learned a few tools that I didn't know about.
I've been here before. I fought like crazy to prevent SunOS 4.x from being tossed on the trash pile. If you think Solaris going away sucks, it sucked harder (for me) to see SunOS go away. It was a far more pleasant environment than Solaris ever was.
As an example of that, because it's fair to go "what??!", I installed some open source solaris in the last few years to play with it. The default install was miserable, the tools were crap. I was having lunch with Bryan Cantrill and some of his team and I mentioned my negative reaction. They laughed and said you have to install the GNU tools and put that in your path first.
Say what? SunOS 4.x came with good tools. In /usr/bin. The default install was useful. Solaris was "standard" in that it came with all the System V stuff in /usr/bin. And Shannon and crew "protected" those standard tools and refused to evolve them to make them useful. They started sucky and stayed sucky all in the name of being "standard". Except nobody else used those tools. There was no other System V based Unix that had any significant volume. *BSD certainly didn't move to System V, Linux wasn't System V, the only System V Unix with any volume was Solaris. So they were standard for no good reason and all these years later Solaris still has crappy stuff in /usr/bin, you want /opt/GNU/bin or something.
Sorry for the rant, and it's off topic. Well maybe it's off topic, maybe not. I sort of wonder if Sun had shipped the GNU stuff and installed it by default as the real tools, would it have made any difference? Probably not but boy, do the default tools make a bad first impression.