FreeBSD's native support for ZFS snapshots and jails
provides a powerful foundation for immutable deployments.
https://github.com/fsmv/daemon/
It's a bad time for me to be mentioning it because I have a major update that's not quite ready to release that changes some client APIs and makes the whole thing much nicer with fully automatic lets encrypt. I haven't had the space to work on it for a while unfortunately.
fukka42•6h ago
ssl-3•5h ago
ZFS has been stable in FreeBSD for something like 17 years, and FreeBSD jails have been around for something like 25 years.
By the time Docker hit 1.0 (about 11 years ago), the use of snapshots and jails had already been normal parts of life in the FreeBSD space for over half of a decade.
IgorPartola•4h ago
But at the same time, the reason Docker won was not because it was groundbreaking tech or because it was amazingly well tested or anything. Just as one example, it has a years old bug which actively gets more comments every week having to do with Docker grossly mishandling quotes in env files.
No, the reason it won is because the development experience and the deploy experience is easy, especially when you are on Linux AND on macOS. I can’t run FreeBSD jails or ZFS on macOS, can I? Definitely not with one file and one command.
Jails and ZFS are amazing tech but they are not accessible. Docker made simple things very simple while being cross-platform enough. Do I feel gross using it? Yeah. It’s a kludgy solution to the problem. But it gets the job done and is supported by every provider out there. I am excited that it is being ported to FreeBSD though I know it will be a very long process.
stingraycharles•3h ago
You’ll be sacrificing a lot and have to hand-roll a lot if you want your organization to switch from Linux+docker to FreeBSD+jails
jonhohle•3h ago
randmeerkat•1h ago
kbenson•1h ago
I imagine FreeBSD could do something similar if they aren't already. IIRC FreeBSD has a Linux emulation layer (but I don't know how much attention it still gets), and it's had containerization primitives longer than linux, so some amount of filling in the gaps in containerization features and syscall tables (if needed) could possibly yield an OCI compatibility later (for all I know all this already exists).
The problem, and the reason if this doesn't exist why people probably weren't as interested in doing the work, is it would always be "mostly" compatible and working and there would be no guarantee that the underlying software wouldn't exhibit bugs or weird behavior from small behavior differences in the platform when emulating something else. Why open yourself up to the headache when you can just run Linux with containers or build what you want on FreeBSD with jails and their own native containerization primitives.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coFIEH3vXPw
lukeh•25m ago
BobbyTables2•2h ago
Who couldn’t become famous with something like a $200M budget?
Feel like they spent it on marketing instead.
Podman is arguably technically superior yet people stay with Docker out of habit…
perrygeo•1h ago
But that has nothing to do with their respective UXs. It's a Linux vs FreeBSD signal.
blahgeek•1h ago
On macOS, docker actually launches a Linux VM to run containers. If this counts, then yes, you can run FreeBSD jails or zfs on macOS, by running a FreeBSD VM.
ssl-3•54m ago
You've got a good take on things, and I do not disagree with what you've written.
soupbowl•5h ago
miladyincontrol•58m ago
arminiusreturns•46m ago
I also find myself using nspawn just to isolate apps like firefox, etc.
righthand•5h ago
FreeBsd has jail managers aka container managers aka “Docker” as well.