Snoracle has their own Linux distribution, but it's really just a clone of Red Hat.
Illumos has a lot of promise to keep the Solaris spirit alive, while being flexible. I personally use SmartOS for a hypervisor OS and it works wonders.
Well, I get the impression Solaris, at least in times past, was super-reliable.
Does it remain as reliable today as it was?
Yes, it's still reliable. The issue isn't that Solaris is no longer reliable; it is that Linux has closed the gap. Nevertheless, die-hard Solaris admins will almost always tell you that Linux is strictly a desktop operating system. But if they were to look at the horizon instead of at their glass of kool-aid they would be able to see the end of their career.
I look around our data centers and I don't see anyone deploying Snoracle machines for new workloads. If I happen to see one and there's an admin nearby, they always say the same thing: "that's for our old [so-and-so legacy application] ... it'll be gone soon." The same holds true for H/PUX or AIX systems. No one wants to bother with the expense and specialized skillsets required to run these machines unless they have legacy workloads to support.
The bottom line here is that the "unix wars" of yore did come to an end, there was a definite winner, and it was Linux.
Not so much - docker is sorta making "distribution" into an almost irrelevant concept.
That's basically CoreOS - lightweight system designed to run docker containers and not much else
What's not to like is that community docker images tend to be lazily maintained, unpatched, etc.
Yeah, if I'm doing the image building (which I am not), I'm going to be starting from a ubuntu-inside-docker type image, and doing it that way, so I'll know I have a pathway towards patching etc.
One of my issues is that we have already built a non-docker cloud infrastructure based on AMI's and RightScale. Some new guys think that's not "cool" enough, so it's getting rewritten as Docker.
I have zero interest in rewriting years of my own (and others') hard work because some jackass doesn't think it's buzzword-compliant enough. So I'll let the new guys do it, and if they screw up, it'll be like "don't say I didn't warn you."
Heh... we were the young ones before.
We pushed the newer things. Some of them stuck. Some of them didn't.
Later, they'll echo our words, with superficial variation.
A hodge-podge of crap.
I would say that the ZFS and Zones would be two which still shine in Illumos / solaris for a production environment. ZFS on Linux is getting ground, but still not quite as stable as ZFS in Solari(sh) types. Zones vs Containers, I would say zones are much better on security as compared to containers, but perhaps things have gotten better... Also, Crossbow networking still blows away linux....
Fri Sep 29 2017 09:35:25 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ UncensoredAside from running software that was built to run on Solaris, what are the advantages Solaris has these days over Linux? ZFS, DTrace, Containers? Linux has equivalents of all of those now.
I was recently working on a system built by the young guys. Docker on one system Kubernetes on another. Ansible playbooks that have most but not all of what they need.
A hodge-podge of crap.
What you think is irrelevant. Whether the system works is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that someone got to put Docker, Kubernetes, and Ansible on their resume.