illumos Day

Monday, October 1st, 2012, 9 am to 6 pm

#illumosday

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Sun Microsystems created Solaris, an operating system descended from UNIX System V R4 and Berkeley Software Distribution via Sun’s own SunOS. Solaris 10 eventually came to include important, revolutionary technologies such as ZFS, zones, and DTrace. In 2005, Sun began to open source the OS as OpenSolaris, while still continuing to sell and support Solaris to its customers (the company was pursuing a similar strategy with other important technologies such as Java and MySQL). The survival of Sun’s open source projects was cast into doubt when Sun was acquired by Oracle in early 2010.

On August 3, 2010, Garrett D’Amore (formerly an engineer at Sun) announced the illumos project to create a truly open source Solaris by replacing the remaining closed-source bits of OpenSolaris with open implementations. By this time, many key Solaris developers had left Oracle, or soon would, so there was plenty of talent available and actively interested in working on this new fork of Solaris. illumos today enjoys a thriving, growing community of engineers: talented newcomers as well as longstanding Sun talent.

illumos Day will gather some of these folks in San Francisco, to share what’s happening in illumos today and where we’re headed. We look forward to seeing you there!

This event was live video streamed – see video links below (final edited videos still to come).

Agenda

8:30 Registration & coffee

9:00 Introduction to the Day – Deirdré Straughan

9:10 illumos State of the Union - Garrett D’Amore

partial video (UStream)
slides

9:30 Building a Business on illumos

Panel: Rod Boothby, Joyent; Bill Roth, Nexenta; Jason Yoho, DEY; moderated by Deirdré Straughan, addressed questions such as:

How well is illumos supported? (ISVs, ecosystem, developers)
What are the legal implications of illumos being open-sourced under the CDDL license?
What are the business costs and benefits of illumos vs other open source operating systems?
What other challenges do you face in running your business on illumos?

video

10:30 coffee

10:45 The illumos Home Data Center – Dan McDonald

Many of the features in Illumos are already being exploited in the Enterprise and Cloud settings. Features like ZFS (for flexible, robust storage), Zones (for both lightweight hosts and even full Virtual Machine containment), and Crossbow (network traffic shaping and bandwidth management) can easily be spotted in the wild today.

A combination of all of the above features can be exploited in a home or small-business setting to great effect on a single physical machine. This talk will present a home and a small-business deployment of Illumos which eliminates multiple boxes, and uses rock-solid Illumos technology.

video
slides

11:15 SmartOS Operations – Ben Rockwood

A look at tools and techniques for large scale operations in a SmartOS environment, from monitoring to configuration management and troubleshooting.

video
slides

noon: lunch

1:30 DTracing the Cloud – Brendan Gregg

Cloud computing facilitates rapid deployment and scaling, often pushing high load at applications under continual development. DTrace allows immediate analysis of issues on live production systems even in these demanding environments – no need to restart or run a special debug kernel. For the illumos kernel, DTrace has been enhanced to support cloud computing, providing more observation capabilities to zones as used by Joyent SmartMachine customers. DTrace is also frequently used by the cloud operators to analyze systems and verify performance isolation of tenants. This talk covers DTrace in the illumos-based cloud, showing examples of real-world performance wins.

video
slides

2:15 Enhanced OS Virtualization for the Cloud - Jerry Jelinek

SmartOS is an Illumos-derived distro developed by Joyent as the base OS for their cloud. This presentation focuses on the OS virtualization capabilities of SmartOS and details the extensive
enhancements made to the OS, based on real-world production experience deploying SmartOS in the Joyent cloud.

video
slides

3:00 illumos Innovations That Will Never be in Oracle Solaris – Adam Leventhal

Illumos was founded on innovation. Since its inception two years ago, illumos has risen from the ashes of OpenSolaris; key technologies that have stagnated in Oracle Solaris – ZFS and DTrace in particular - have thrived. Hear what’s new in illumos… and why you’re unlikely to see similar innovation in Oracle Solaris.

video

4:00 Using illumos to Change the Storage World – Chris Nelson

4:30 Contributing to illumos – Bayard Bell

Getting involved in open source software is a significant commitment of time and energy, but involvement affords a range of opportunities to match and grow your abilities. This talk considers the particular issues in getting involved in illumos and the reasons for doing so, from the perspective of someone who was an outsider eighteen months ago now working on the project professionally but previously active in the voluntary community side via the OpenIndiana project.

Illumos/ZFS Day