| Briefly: * Between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11, Oracle bought Sun and killed the open source efforts known as OpenSolaris. illumos started from the final open source bits of what eventually became Solaris 11 and has now significantly diverged. Solaris is effectively dead, illumos is very much alive. * There are a number of illumos "forks", of which SmartOS is ours, but all forks still share the common illumos code (we merge daily) and contribute heavily back to the common base. Each fork may contain features which aren't yet ready for merging back, e.g. our work to port KVM[1] to SmartOS is not part of illumos yet, but other distributions such as OmniOS[2] have taken that work and integrated it. * SmartOS is a minimal distribution, we have removed a lot of parts (desktop, shared storage, etc.) which do not fit in with our explicit design goals, and added tooling around virtualisation. You boot from USB/CD/PXE into a minimal live-image hypervisor known as the Global Zone[3], and then perform work in zones which are backed by local storage. To upgrade, you simply replace the USB image with a newer platform and reboot into the new live image. * As for software, we provide userland built from pkgsrc[4], which gives you access to over 13,000 packages available under /opt/local, allowing you to use both the SmartOS tools as well as any third party software you may need (e.g. GNU stuff). There is even full desktop stuff provided, should you want to use it[5]. * In Manta, when running a job you are basically running in a zone with as many pkgsrc packages pre-installed as we can manage (currently nearly 9,000), so the chances are that the software you need is available. If not, you can easily build it yourself and the store it back in Manta to use later as an asset[6] for your jobs. * There is definitely a free tier for Joyent zones (search for "free" on https://www.joyent.com/products/public-cloud/pricing), I thought there was also an additional free tier for Manta but I can't see it right now, however it will only cost a few cents to do some basic tests in Manta and get a feel for what it can do. I primarily work on pkgsrc, but I know a number of other engineers will be reading this thread and can comment in more depth on SDC/Manta, so feel free to ask any more questions or pop onto #smartos or #manta on Freenode IRC. Thanks. [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2011/08/15/kvm-on-illumos/ [2] http://omnios.omniti.com/ [3] http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/smartos-and-the-global-zone.h... [4] http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/ [5] https://twitter.com/jperkin/status/348506063336783872 [6] https://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/jobs-reference.html#assets-... |
In regards of the free tier, now I found it, but its mention is placed as the last line, after all the paid plans and the part about "Contact sales if your requirements exceed everything we've planned a price for" ;)
About Manta, I'd like to know about what kind of data objects it supports? Like having a matrix of time series data and making quick selections and sorts, near real time?
Docs talked about hierarchical storage and search, which sounds really useful, too, but what is search in this context?