Digital Ocean stops supporting BSDs
reddit / freebsd
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Xerxero · 2022-05-04 16:04
At DigitalOcean, our mission is to empower our customers by providing
them with simple, reliable cloud infrastructure and we couldn’t be
prouder to support customers and businesses like you developing world-
class applications. We’re reaching out to let you know that we are
phasing out our FreeBSD Droplet.
Starting July 1, 2022, FreeBSD Droplets will no longer be available.
In order to simplify our cloud offerings and refocus our efforts on
developing and maintaining distributions that our customers use most,
we’re ending support for new FreeBSD Droplets.
Beginning June 1, 2022, you will no longer be able to create FreeBSD-
based Droplets through the cloud control panel. You will still be able
to create FreeBSD-based Droplets through the API until July 1, 2022,
but after July 1, 2022, only legacy FreeBSD Droplets will remain on
the platform.
Rest assured: Existing FreeBSD Droplets and FreeBSD Droplets created
from May 1, 2022–July 1, 2022 will continue to work as usual despite
these changes to our offerings.
You’ll also still be able to create Droplets using FreeBSD after July
1 by using DigitalOcean’s custom images feature to import a virtual
disk image of FreeBSD OS. Custom images are free to upload and charged
at $0.05 per GB per month to store.
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Xerxero · 2022-05-04 16:09
DO was my go to for FreeBSD vps.
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Then-Face-6004 · 2022-05-04 16:21
I've got a few FreeBSD droplets on DO and haven't received any
communication about this. Is there a link?
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Xerxero · 2022-05-04 16:28
I got an email
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[deleted] · 2022-05-04 16:34
[deleted]
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QGRr2t · 2022-05-04 16:41
I can recommend Vultr for FreeBSD instances, or for more control
Netcup.eu have good, cheap and fast VPS where FreeBSD is a first class
citizen and works well from experience.
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Original_Sedawk · 2022-05-04 17:05
Thank-for the recommendations. This is a little sad as I like Digital
Ocean and will now mostly likely move - but Vultr seems like a good
option.
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Original_Sedawk · 2022-05-04 17:11
The text of the post is cut-and-paste from the email I received.
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[deleted] · 2022-05-04 17:23
[deleted]
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AntoineDarquier · 2022-05-04 17:27
I also find it sad. I found them to be one of the best cloud providers
just because of the work they put into their documentation, which was
often better than the documentation from AWS, Azure and GCP. If you
are looking for an alternative, the following providers support
FreeBSD:
https://arpnetworks.com/
https://netactuate.com/
https://www.ibm.com/cloud
https://www.cloudsigma.com/
https://www.atlantic.net/
https://klarasystems.com/freebsd-development/
https://www.gigenetcloud.com/
https://host1.no/client/cart.php
http://www.johncompanies.com/freebsd-vps.html
https://nqhost.com/freebsd-vps.html
https://www.transip.eu/vps/freebsd/
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Then-Face-6004 · 2022-05-04 17:52
Huh, I haven't received an email about it. Yet...
EDIT: Just got it. Now I’m going to check out Vultr
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lenzo1337 · 2022-05-04 18:34
I got one too.
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Xerxero · 2022-05-04 18:42
Thanks for the list. Most I haven’t heard before.
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manys · 2022-05-04 18:44
It always amuses me to see rejections of FreeBSD like this phrased as
"in order to simplify." While the /etc/motd change points in a
worrying direction, nothing has ever been as simple as FreeBSD for me
to use.
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zilti · 2022-05-04 18:50
I and the company I work at are Netcup customers, and I can confirm
that FreeBSD works great on there. On top of that, I only had positive
experiences with Netcup, they're great, and considering the service
they provide I almost feel bad for paying so little for it.
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celestrion · 2022-05-04 18:52
This is a good thing--provided that DO continue to support any running
image so long as it has the magic `cloud-init` secret-sauce.
The existing FreeBSD images are pretty awful if somebody wants a
machine they can upgrade without much strife. I wouldn't recommend
using them unless you dismiss/rebuild instances instead of maintaining
them over time.
I know it's not "cloud-native"/"cattle not cats" thinking, but my VPS
is just another server that I happen to not be able to touch. It's
not ephemeral; it gets updates. And whatever DO-supplied image I
started with had some broken boot environment that `freebsd-update`
can't upgrade without manual intervention.
If we're left to supply our own images, we can also supply our own
known-brokenness, instead of someone else's disaster surprise.
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QGRr2t · 2022-05-04 18:58
I've thought the same thing! I run a Tor exit node/router on a Netcup
FreeBSD VPS and they have been nothing short of amazing about it. I
emailed them to give a heads up when installing it, and got my first
abuse report last week (after 5TB of trouble free-traffic, using a
reduced-reduced exit policy). I simply replied to the notice with
(basically) 'This is a Tor exit router, as per previous email. The
abuse isn't mine and I have no way to log or track the traffic on this
VPS. I am a common carrier of traffic just like you'. The ticket was
closed in minutes with a 'No problem!', and my server was never
suspended. Great service tbh.
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Ikinoki · 2022-05-04 20:11
Majority of hosts are Linux, those can't write ufs, and zfs is
wasteful on cloud, so there's that issue which is not going away.
We tried to implement it but it required reworking whole platform of
deployment from guestfish to custom solutions with weird small extfs
partitions inside freebsd vms and custom scripts or even weider tech
to allow config, script and credentials injection. Another alternative
is creating custom handling for bsd only systems which was also an
issue. Thankfully in the future we'll drop configs via agent but for
now it's not that easy.
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Xerxero · 2022-05-04 20:16
The netcup offering seems quite a lot better than what DO had to
offer. Maybe less configuration options.
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manys · 2022-05-04 20:36
"Disk is cheap," as the saying goes, but I get it. It sounds like it's
a corner you painted yourself into, tho.
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nixcraft · 2022-05-04 20:53
I have a lightsail FreeBSD VM from AWS, and it costs like $5 per
month.
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nickbernstein · 2022-05-04 21:04
That sucks. FreeBSD works on Google cloud.
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snogbat · 2022-05-04 21:33
I've got a few on DO and a few on Vultr. I've been really happy with
Vultr (mostly in the giant NJ DuPont datacenter), was just keeping DO
around to not put all my eggs in one basket.
I also have one small VPS at RamNode. I don't know that it's
officially supported, it all seems a little janky, had to email to
have them move me to a different physical host for FreeBSD support.
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snogbat · 2022-05-04 21:35
I had an Atlantic FreeBSD VPS for a bit, it worked well, the only
issue for me was the price on their tiny instances kept going up.
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johnklos · 2022-05-04 21:44
DigitalOcean is a mess of shitty actors. Let them market to the lowest
common denominator and to scammers. There are plenty of other
providers that don't care more about money than everything else.
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johnklos · 2022-05-04 21:47
What a BS response. What you're basically saying is that you're
changing what you're doing and you haven't the technical knowhow to
add any extra support, and you're too shortsighted to recognize how
having diversity in your configurations means you're testing more edge
cases.
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-04 22:34
Both of my FreeBSD servers are on digitalocean. Huge shame.
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-04 22:37
“ZFS is wasteful on cloud” is one of the silliest things I’ve ever
heard a VPS provider say out loud. WE PAY for our storage, and on your
platform, we pay too much for it. I’ll be canceling my subscriptions
to digitalocean. I’ve been a customer for 5+ years and this is
bullshit.
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-04 22:43
cloud-init BSD images don’t support IPV6 on DO.
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celestrion · 2022-05-04 22:53
I didn't know that. Thank you for the heads-up.
Seems that it's any custom image, not just BSD images. It would be
really nice of DO to fix that someday, but if they'd rather lose us to
their competitors, that's also doable.
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ChaosInMind · 2022-05-04 23:08
It’s really a legit concern. Perhaps someone should launch a bsd only
provider. Provide iscsi to a zfs array.
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-04 23:11
There are a dozen VPS providers in this thread that support ZFS as a
first class citizen.
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ShovvTime13 · 2022-05-04 23:15
Hey Nick, I wanted to ask your advice on depression. Can you DM me
please?
Thanks!
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mutynne · 2022-05-05 01:15
I use Hetzner these days, having moved off from DO a while back.
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-05 01:44
Do you use BSD on Hetzner? I thought they only supported linux.
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PkHolm · 2022-05-05 02:28
HostVirtual ( now NetAcutate ) done it. Yes, freebsd is running form
EXT2 partition, with small ufs /boot but it is not a problem at all.
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mutynne · 2022-05-05 02:50
Yes, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. When you initially make the VPS, only Linux
is available. However, they're both available as an image you can
mount via the control panel, then reboot and begin the install process
via kvm console. Then unmount the image via the control panel when you
reboot.
I don't use their API so I don't know if you can just spin up FreeBSD
VPSes that way without mounting the image after initial creation. You
might be able to.
Been using them for four years and have had zero issues.
For about a year, I also used DO in tandem, and eventually started
having a ton of issues related to cloud-init and networking.
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-05 02:54
> However, they're both available as an image you can mount via the
control panel, then reboot and begin the install process via kvm
console. Then unmount the image
Does that also work on dedicated servers?
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mutynne · 2022-05-05 02:55
Haven't gotten a dedicated server from them, so I can't answer,
unfortunately. But their support is pretty friendly, if you want to
reach out to them.
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daemonpenguin · 2022-05-05 03:05
Vultr and Contabo also work well with FreeBSD. I've used them both
with FreeBSD VPS instances.
https://contabo.com/en/
https://www.vultr.com/
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Ikinoki · 2022-05-05 05:06
Zfs is a great system, but really wasteful for say 1gb vps. I know
because I run one site with 8gb ram and half ram is zfs
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Ikinoki · 2022-05-05 05:07
Hi, I'm not from DO.
I just wrote that I acknowledge legit issues with BSD config on
commercial platforms
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-05 05:09
Take a couple of snapshots and the so-called waste goes away
instantly. It gains utility for taking up more resources. HAMMER2 is
even more efficient.
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Ikinoki · 2022-05-05 05:10
With zfs unfortunately it is wasteful on many levels, we use nvme and
zfs just not made for those, it's for hdds. Too many writes due to
amplification especially because of being provisioned on raw lvm. Then
there's ram issue because we cache writes on host using ram and optane
drives but it caches again inside vm - that's so wasteful.
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Ikinoki · 2022-05-05 05:15
It doesn't though, it hammers nvme with write amplification. That and
using ram for cache when host uses ram for cache and optane.
We use freebsd for backup solutions where we have zfs for a lot of
rust. But inside vms it is a waste fs wise. Other parts of os are
pretty good (well ksm is not supported but it's a minor issue)
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inco · 2022-05-05 06:24
Just send a DM instead of announcing that you both have depression.
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-05 06:25
Your critique is over my head. As a user, I don't really care. It's
more efficient to me because I don't have to pay DO for snapshot
storage when I can simply use the filesystem. I don't see how this
change fixes the problem - forcing people to use cloud-init images
with broken networking makes things more efficient how, exactly? How
have Vultr and Netcup figured this out at scale and DO can't?
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C0c04l4 · 2022-05-05 06:42
Sure, people in this sub will be unhappy and say things like "this is
bullshit", "I'm leaving DO" (edit: and angrily downvote this comment).
But if you have 0.02% of users using FreeBSD and it represents a lot
of work to maintain and make it work nicely with the rest of their
system, it is a good move to refocus on linux only, because let's be
honest, most deployments today involve docker/podman/k8s. That's what
the cloud is about, and DigitalOcean is a cloud provider. If you want
a FreeBSD pet server, it's not the right place to get one, that's it.
From a business perspective, it makes sense. From a user perspective,
it's less choice, but it's not like there aren't other cloud providers
with BSD images (Vultr is pretty good).
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Ikinoki · 2022-05-05 06:55
DO just thinks it's not profitable that's all. The amount of expertise
and support you need for this small thing is staggeringly incomparable
to the amount of profit you get from this. They probably looked at
0.01% usage for bsd and decided to drop it because it makes 0 sense.
I guarantee vultr will drop it soon too.
FreeBSD is just not optimized for current net consensus.
P.S. and zfs snapshot won't save you from host disk corruption which
can happen (and no cloud host offers guarantees for data reliability
unless you pay thousands), but an lvm snapshot or backup can.
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1s44c · 2022-05-05 08:07
You can boot off an install CD and dd over any disk image your like.
I've installed BSDs this way.
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-05 08:37
> DO just thinks it's not profitable that's all. The amount of
expertise and support you need for this small thing is staggeringly
incomparable to the amount of profit you get from this. They probably
looked at 0.01% usage for bsd and decided to drop it because it makes
0 sense.
If they bothered to update their images and documentation, more people
would use it. FreeBSD hasn't been a first-class citizen on DO since
the month it became available.
> I guarantee vultr will drop it soon too.
So netcup will get my money. If DO and Vultr don't want my money,
that's their problem. Clearly it is profitable or nobody would do it.
> FreeBSD is just not optimized for current net consensus.
Net consensus can never change if we don't put effort into supporting
smaller open source choices. It has better network performance than
linux in many applications.
> P.S. and zfs snapshot won't save you from host disk corruption which
can happen (and no cloud host offers guarantees for data reliability
unless you pay thousands), but an lvm snapshot or backup can.
I also backup off-site using borgbackup. Snapshots are a very
convenient money-saving first-level of protection.
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-05 08:39
Have you tried this on a dedicated machine or just a shared VPS?
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SweetBeanBread · 2022-05-05 11:42
so what if someone uses ZFSonLinux, or is that not possible on DO
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Ikinoki · 2022-05-05 12:49
It is possible but it doesn't make sense because of what I wrote
several times here.
ZFS use cases are strictly hdds on raw systems.
I'm still waiting for no cache zfs-like filesystem. On linux vm you
can use lvm with thin provisioning to leverage snapshots. But BSD has
only ufs2 snaps which are not as good.
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Ikinoki · 2022-05-05 12:56
>> DO just thinks it's not profitable that's all. The amount of
expertise and support you need for this small thing is staggeringly
incomparable to the amount of profit you get from this. They probably
looked at 0.01% usage for bsd and decided to drop it because it makes
0 sense.
>
>If they bothered to update their images and documentation, more
people would use it. FreeBSD hasn't been a first-class citizen on DO
since the month it became available.
>
>
I don't argue with that.
>> I guarantee vultr will drop it soon too.
>
>
>So netcup will get my money. If DO and Vultr don't want my money,
that's their problem. Clearly it is profitable or nobody would do it.
>
>
Until they grow and stop supporting BSD, or they don't and continue.
>> FreeBSD is just not optimized for current net consensus.
>
>
>Net consensus can never change if we don't put effort into supporting
smaller open source choices. It has better network performance than
linux in many applications.
>
>
By net consensus I mean cloud applications not network performance
(however lack of mlag, clustered fs etc bothers me a lot).
>> P.S. and zfs snapshot won't save you from host disk corruption
which can happen (and no cloud host offers guarantees for data
reliability unless you pay thousands), but an lvm snapshot or backup
can.
>
>
>I also backup off-site using borgbackup. Snapshots are a very
convenient money-saving first-level of protection.
They are but you can leverage much cheaper thin lvs inside vm, and on
host and they'll be less fragile then zfs ones in case of unforeseen
circumstances like power off on vm or ssd, raid failure at controller
level on host
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MexicanPete · 2022-05-05 13:06
+1 for arpnetworks
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ShovvTime13 · 2022-05-05 14:07
This guy's DM is closed... I cannot? And I don't have a depression,
just feeling quite bad.
No idea if this guy feels depressed or something, just saw a comment
of him somewhere on the reddit with a good advice and wanted to ask
something.
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ShovvTime13 · 2022-05-05 14:08
"Judge before understand" right? Good
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daemonpenguin · 2022-05-05 14:18
On the default configuration ZFS will use half of your RAM for cache.
It doesn't matter if you have 4GB or 64GB.
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Ikinoki · 2022-05-05 14:23
Yes and not on default you'll have trouble constantly tweaking it.
Look I know its limits, it's great for hdds but sucks for nvme or even
ssd because the problems it was made for no longer exist there at same
level. Most cloud nodes are ssd at least if not nvme. It doesn't make
sense to run zfs in a vm on top of raw lvm in nvme. You lose a lot of
performance, ram and cpu for just snapshots? Put lvm thin and get same
result without any losses.
ZFS gives only problems atop of so many abstractions.
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daemonpenguin · 2022-05-05 14:23
Long-term it probably makes sense for them. I think it's unfortunate
though. A few years ago when I was shopping around for virtual hosts
for clients, one of the companies at the top of my list was Digital
Ocean precisely because they supported FreeBSD. And they were fairly
competitive price-wise.
Eventually it came down to basically a coin flip between them and
Vultr. Now I'm glad I ended up setting my clients up with Vultr (who
still supports FreeBSD) because otherwise I'd be migrating them right
now.
Sure, FreeBSD is a small portion of the market, but for those of us
working with multiple operating systems this means we're taking _both_
our Linux and FreeBSD VPS systems (and business) elsewhere.
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C0c04l4 · 2022-05-05 15:17
It would be really interesting to have figures from DO about their
percentage of FreeBSD VMs.
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daemonpenguin · 2022-05-05 15:23
It would. I'd also be interested in seeing numbers on how many people
run both FreeBSD and another OS.
If I'm a customer with just 1 FreeBSD instance and 9 Linux instances,
that's just 10% usage for FreeBSD. But since I need a company with a
mix of environments, if FreeBSD is no longer a supported option, all
10 of my instances are reliant on DO having FreeBSD as an option.
If they drop FreeBSD it doesn't just mean they lose that 1 FreeBSD
VPS, they lose all 10 when I migrate to another company.
On the other hand if most of their FreeBSD customers only use FreeBSD
(and no other OS) then any business they lose is closer to a 1:1 ratio
with FreeBSD instances.
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1s44c · 2022-05-05 15:30
On a dedicated machine. Although I built the disk image in a virtual
machine.
cat disk.img | ssh server 'cat >/dev/sda'
And reboot.
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-05 16:43
Thanks I’ll try this
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-05 16:53
> Until they grow and stop supporting BSD, or they don't and continue.
So then somebody else will fill the void. There is market demand for
BSD on the server.
> By net consensus I mean cloud applications not network performance
(however lack of mlag, clustered fs etc bothers me a lot).
The BSD equivalent to mlag is lagg. HAMMER2 is designed from the
ground up for clustering and SMP.
> They are but you can leverage much cheaper thin lvs inside vm, and
on host and they'll be less fragile then zfs ones in case of
unforeseen circumstances like power off on vm or ssd, raid failure at
controller level on host
Why? Because they’re copy-on-write? ZFS can do that.
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manys · 2022-05-05 17:44
Fair enough!
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Ikinoki · 2022-05-05 20:29
>> Until they grow and stop supporting BSD, or they don't and
continue.
>
>
>So then somebody else will fill the void. There is market demand for
BSD on the server.
>
>
>> By net consensus I mean cloud applications not network performance
(however lack of mlag, clustered fs etc bothers me a lot).
>
>
>The BSD equivalent to mlag is lagg. HAMMER2 is designed from the
ground up for clustering and SMP.
>
>
not familiar with hammer2 (I know it's dragonflybsd prod) but lagg is
not mlag
>> They are but you can leverage much cheaper thin lvs inside vm, and
on host and they'll be less fragile then zfs ones in case of
unforeseen circumstances like power off on vm or ssd, raid failure at
controller level on host
>
>
>
>Why? Because they’re copy-on-write? ZFS can do that.
Because they are cheaper resources wise and less fragile.
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alexnoyle · 2022-05-05 20:53
Why are they less fragile?
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Ikinoki · 2022-05-05 21:14
Because of their simplicity. Cut zfs system into small pieces and
remove some and that data won't be readable or recoverable easily. Do
same to lvm and it's still going to read because it is dumb and
doesn't rely on transactions or checksums. Sure there will be missing
data but you can still recover parts of it. With zfs you'll have to
dig deep with zdb and there's a possibility it won't even work (I had
once an issue with deduo which was crazy and it destroyed pool,
another guy pulled raid0 drive out and also had a lot of fun)
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tambow44 · 2022-05-07 02:59
I’ve used vultr for years, never had a problem with them. Great
support (was only ever non-tech issues as well, never had a server
crash etcetc).
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CoolTheCold · 2022-05-08 08:53
> If they drop FreeBSD it doesn't just mean they lose that 1 FreeBSD
VPS, they lose all 10 when I migrate to another company.
I have the opinion here that:
* FreeBSD based projects tend to use less of PaaS/SaaS offerings from
DO - i.e. use less managed MongoDB, use less managed databases,
LoadBalancers and so on [ where more money for DO is earned ]
* FreeBSD based projects has no interest from modern developers [kinda
anything not supporting running docker based images is out of interest
of modern devs] and tend to be sysadmin friendly, while DO cares on
Developers
* manpower needed to support FreeBSD breed is the same or even more
comparing to support one of the Linux Distros (say Centos, Ubuntu, so
on) while again, interest is luckily 1-2 percents
I think that FreeBSD gonna shrink and shrink until it become
developers friendly or will become very niche product. One can take
Microsoft as example - they implemented WSL and even WSA to become
developers friendly. They added VSCode support for Docker, Kubernetes,
Github (say you can manage pull requests from VSC).
Sysadmins crowd to be extincted. FreeBSD need to accept this fact.
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daemonpenguin · 2022-05-08 17:15
I'm curious what your basis is for these assumptions. While I agree
FreeBSD is likely taking up less of the market on VPS systems that,
for example, Linux (point #1), i strongly question the other two
assumptions.
FreeBSD projects are definitely an interest for modern developers
(lots of them) and virtually no developers I know use or care about
Docker. (point #2)
Supporting FreeBSD is probably easier than most of the alternatives
(point #3). FreeBSD has a slow, steady development process and better
documentation than most alternatives, like CentOS or Ubuntu. Interest
might be low, but maintaining FreeBSD images is pretty close to a zero
effort exercise, especially next to most Linux distros.
FreeBSD is a highly developer friendly platform. In fact, it's mostly
targeting developers and sysadmins. FreeBSD is doing just fine and
seems to be growing in popularity (and income) so why would they
change their approach?
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lazy-xo · 2022-05-08 17:27
Doesn’t make sense - it’s not difficult to maintain (and the reason we
can add keys for our droplets) - especially since they were kind of
pioneers for one click installs of the OS. A conference presentation
on getting FreeBSD on Digital Ocean:
https://youtu.be/wsgXAbMvfsI
They’re the only droplets I create :(
Lol at whoever said they’re losing all 10 of theirs - hit me up I’ve
got too many dedicated boxes to leave a fellow Beastie stranded -
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lazy-xo · 2022-05-08 17:34
I’ve used most of these - John Companies has been providing FreeBSD
hosting since early 2000’s - via jails - they know they’re stuff and
do for free what a lot change for.
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CoolTheCold · 2022-05-08 20:56
Focusing on point #2
> FreeBSD projects are definitely an interest for modern developers
(lots of them) and virtually no developers I know use or care about
Docker. (point #2)
We all tend to have very unique environment and people around us and
such collisions could be met of course and I believe you - but I
cannot imagine this.
In the world where just today got email from DO, stating (quoting):
> Let’s be honest: Kubernetes is complicated. But this hasn’t stopped
us from including it in our mission to simplify the developer
experience.
> DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) makes K8s easy. With DOKS, deploy
your fully managed cluster in minutes or follow our product team along
for a thorough video overview on setting up a cluster and using the
different features available.
In the world where searching through Upwork.com (Freelance portal,
which I think represents trends for small to medium business and
companies quite well) for vacancies gives me:
* 9 results for FreeBSD
* 2249 results for Linux
* 1584 results for Docker
I don't have such imagination power of how those Devs avoid and keep 0
interest in Docker. In my env, I guess around 80-90% of people more or
less related to any development (including DevOps/sysadmins) using
Docker/Podman/.. at least once a week.
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CoolTheCold · 2022-05-08 21:03
> Supporting FreeBSD is probably easier than most of the alternatives
(point #3). FreeBSD has a slow, steady development process and better
documentation than most alternatives, like CentOS or Ubuntu. Interest
might be low, but maintaining FreeBSD images is pretty close to a zero
effort exercise, especially next to most Linux distros.
Nor me nor you have insights from DO, but if it would be me in charge
of their calculations of supporting FreeBSD, I'd consider:
* direct costs - providing images/droplets with tooling integration
(say on DO you can get into the shell (bash) of your droplet (VPS)
right from web admin UI). Even if it's just single person, it can
easily give you 100k USD$ per year.
* indirect costs of keeping people in support team be aware of common
problems and keeping knowledge base - no idea how much can be spent
here
* cloud-init/virtio/local mirrors/so on - tooling which requires some
efforts and headaches
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unitrunker2 · 2022-05-09 03:34
If I understand the email correctly, FreeBSD becomes a custom image. A
5GB image - at 5 cents per GB per month would cost an extra $3 per
year.
I can live with this while deciding whether and when to move
elsewhere.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
CoolTheCold · 2022-05-09 16:27
Nice
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alexansh · 2022-05-10 09:59
My brain stops supporting Digital Ocean.
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[deleted] · 2022-05-10 16:56
[deleted]
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grahamperrin · 2022-05-10 17:01
> Digital Ocean stops supporting BSDs
False. Please don't use misleading titles.
----
A truer title (the words of DigitalOcean, in their e-mail) would have
been:
> ## Phasing out creation of FreeBSD droplets
Further information: [April 2022 Products and Features |
DigitalOcean](https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/latest-products-and-
features-april-2022)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Xerxero · 2022-05-10 17:36
Well they are. FreeBSD was a first class OS and now it isn’t. It still
runs but is not supported by DO. It says so in your link
“To focus on our most used distributions we’re ending support for new
FreeBSD Droplets”
At least that is how I read it.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-13 06:46
> not supported by DO.
DigitalOcean **does** support custom images:
https://i.imgur.com/DlY7IVu.png
* [How to Upload Custom Images :: DigitalOcean
Documentation](https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/images/custom-
images/how-to/upload/) (2018-09-25, updated 2020-08-25).
DigitalOcean directs readers to , with
**images of FreeBSD**. This important link was missing from your
paste.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-13 06:56
> I can recommend Vultr for FreeBSD instances, …
[Latest FreeBSD and Vultr VPS](https://old.reddit.com/r/freebsd/commen
ts/uogeav/latest_freebsd_and_vultr_vps/)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-13 06:58
> … Netcup … FreeBSD works great …
Please, is there anything to suggest that FreeBSD will *not* work with
DigitalOcean?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-13 06:59
> FreeBSD works on Google cloud.
FreeBSD will continue to work on DigitalOcean.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-13 07:01
> Is there a link?
Yes:
* [April 2022 Products and Features |
DigitalOcean](https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/latest-products-and-
features-april-2022)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-13 07:05
> shame
Why, exactly?
Please note that DigitalOcean is **not** ceasing support for FreeBSD.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-13 07:11
> The text of the post is cut-and-paste from the email I received.
Please: what, exactly, was the **Subject** line of the e-mail?
Postscript: according to the subject was **Phasing out creation of
FreeBSD droplets**
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-13 07:16
Can you also try the image with DigitalOcean?
[How to Upload Custom Images :: DigitalOcean
Documentation](https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/images/custom-
images/how-to/upload/)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Xerxero · 2022-05-13 08:52
They link to 3rd party images that most likely will run on DO.
But if they break for some reason no DO engineer will help you.
Because it’s not supported.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
alexnoyle · 2022-05-13 11:24
They’re sunseting it. Support won’t end right away, but there will
soon come a time when you won’t be able to create new FreeBSD
droplets.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
alexnoyle · 2022-05-13 11:25
DigitalOcean lacks support for IPV6 when you use Custom
Images. For the web servers I run that’s not practical.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-14 07:42
> They’re sunseting it. Support won’t end right away, but there will
soon come a time when you won’t be able to create new FreeBSD
droplets.
Source?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
alexnoyle · 2022-05-14 12:52
Uh... the original post this thread is about? I also got it in my
inbox:
> Starting July 1, 2022, FreeBSD Droplets will no longer be available.
In order to simplify our cloud offerings and refocus our efforts on
developing and maintaining distributions that our customers use most,
we’re ending support for new FreeBSD Droplets.
In what world is this "not ending support" for FreeBSD? Do we have a
different understanding of the term support?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-14 13:48
> inbox
What, exactly, was the subject line?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-14 14:15
> ZFS use cases are strictly hdds on raw systems.
Not so.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
alexnoyle · 2022-05-14 15:26
“Phasing out creation of FreeBSD droplets”
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-14 16:25
+1
Thanks.
> “Phasing out creation of FreeBSD droplets”
– that's quite different from "Digital Ocean stops supporting BSDs".
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-14 16:35
From the official documentation:
> … Once you have at least one custom image added to your account, you
can [create a Droplet from a custom
image](https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/images/custom-
images/how-to/create-droplets/).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-14 16:39
> … you won’t be able to create new FreeBSD droplets.
You can upload a prebuilt image of FreeBSD, then create a droplet from
that image.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
alexnoyle · 2022-05-14 16:43
FreeBSD was the only BSD they ever supported and it’s now being
dropped. I don’t understand the angle you’re trying to take.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
alexnoyle · 2022-05-14 16:44
Not if you want to use IPV6. It’s unsupported in custom images.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-14 16:51
Already noted, thanks:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ikinoki · 2022-05-14 17:39
Actually yes so.
Bitrot is not an issue for ssds. Nowadays without major firmware
issues we don't see bitrot. There's also ECC there. So number one
reason zfs was created for is not needed.
Another reason is access times. HDDs have crazy latency - not so much
an issue in ssd. So ZFS caches what SSD caches this all is just a
matroshka about to break apart.
Third reason is consistent speed which arc solves. SSD gives that.
In fact only reason you'd want zfs is snapshotting and that's
achievable with lvm thin.
So by not using zfs in ssd you lose nothing and win ram and speed and
longevity of ssd (because zfs writes are shit and can't be tuned for
most ssds because of abstractions and result in wire amplification
operations (I've seen 25x at non aligned and the smallest I've seen on
ssd was 2x))
You have risk of slight amplification with lvm as well if misaligned
but not to the same extent because lvm is a pretty down to earth tech.
Zfs was made to solve issues with hdds which couldn't have been solved
before and offloaded these problems to cpu and ram, SSD solved it all
at hardware level without the need to offload
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-15 09:23
> In fact only reason you'd want zfs is snapshotting
Not a fact.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ikinoki · 2022-05-15 09:52
Great sure, tons of facts from me, empty words from you :))))
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-15 16:19
> ZFS use cases are strictly hdds on raw systems.
Have you never heard of ZFS boot environments?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-15 16:20
> facts
Omissions.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ikinoki · 2022-05-16 00:12
> ZFS boot environments
How is this different from several partitions on GPT or MBR? The use
case for this is extremely narrow and can be replicated easily with
conventional tools.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ikinoki · 2022-05-16 00:16
That's not an omission. That's irrelevant. It's like saying "But Plan
9 was so ahead of its time". Which is true, but it was and will be
irrelevant.
Right now the only place I can justify using SSD in our environment
(meaning where we can sacrifice performance for a few nice additions)
is a backup server (with cheap rust) and warm cache (huge slow flash
drives mostly for reads). But that's our environment. Sure for home it
is cool to run a NAS with ZFS.
But give or take 20 years and HDDs will go the way of CD, maybe even
10 years.
They already lag behind in sizes. Soon they'll lag in prices
(especially due to high usage of rares in HDD compared to SSD)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
alexnoyle · 2022-05-16 10:44
I came across this post recently
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/questions-about-zfs-on-freebsd-and-
linux.81380/page-3#post-536020 that seems to contradict this idea that
ZFS is a RAM hog by default.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
alexnoyle · 2022-05-16 10:45
I came across this post that seems to contradict the idea that ZFS is
wasteful on a 1GB VPS https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/questions-
about-zfs-on-freebsd-and-linux.81380/page-3#post-536020 - curious
about your thoughts on this
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ikinoki · 2022-05-16 14:59
Well first of all, by wasteful I mean - there's no NEED to run zfs,
any good volume managed or even snapshotted FS would be better because
it won't need additional cache like completely. It won't need much cpu
either and COW waste. It's wasteful for VPS because host system
already performs all of this. And if it doesn't then ZFS won't help
with anything (case in point when we had a thin pool run out of
metadata space and it corrupted COMPLETELY all ZFS and BTRFS based
systems. We easily recovered all other EXT, NTFS and UFS systems).
A good start point on how fragile ZFS is is here:
https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-
docs/Performance%20and%20Tuning/Hardware.html
Pay special attention to Hardware RAID because about 99.999% of Cloud
instances are hosted on LVM/LVMthin partitions/ZFS vdevs over iscsi.
Which is usually running on top of software raid on ssd (rarely
hardware raid for HDD). So we have 2 or 3 abstractions which
completely lie to upstream - in this case your cloud instance - about
underlying hardware.
This is actually what Sun Microsystems devs of ZFS wrote about on
hardware raids
Here's right now working website with a few thousand visits daily:
last pid: 80959; load averages: 0.42, 0.48, 0.49
up 0+16:23:46 13:24:03
91 processes: 1 running, 90 sleeping
CPU: 1.0% user, 3.4% nice, 1.2% system, 0.2% interrupt, 94.2%
idle
Mem: 901M Active, 1718M Inact, 11G Wired, 1617M Free
ARC: 7488M Total, 2797M MFU, 3853M MRU, 3868K Anon, 117M Header,
717M Other
5916M Compressed, 14G Uncompressed, 2.36:1 Ratio
Swap: 2048M Total, 2048M Free
But that's me increasing RAM recently. It was at 9GB and ate all 9GB
of RAM :/ We sat in swap for some time.
Mind you FS is barely used here, this is not a file server but mostly
data from RAM server. This is not OK.
Sure maybe that person turned off ARC (you can do that by few switches
in zfs config like primarycache=none and secodarycache=none, fun fact,
I had to do that once because of dedup mishap (tell me why dedup is
still broken in zfs?))
Good comparison is here:
last pid: 22426; load averages: 0.06, 0.04, 0.00
up 74+19:13:28 13:35:32
32 processes: 1 running, 31 sleeping
CPU: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 0.5% system, 0.0% interrupt, 99.5%
idle
Mem: 548K Active, 25M Inact, 8148K Laundry, 60G Wired, 1543M Free
ARC: 54G Total, 586M MFU, 52G MRU, 211M Header, 1053M Other
51G Compressed, 51G Uncompressed, 1.01:1 Ratio
This is a backup server without swap. ZFS is an ass here as you can
see eating almost all the ram. That's because it's 63TiB rust pool
which gets hammered by backups constantly.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-17 00:28
> The use case for this is extremely narrow
Yeah, *right*. So *extremely* narrow a use case, that automated
creation of ZFS boot environments has been added to freebsd-update(8)
in base, and released; FreeBSD `13.1-RELEASE`.
In other words, *not* narrow.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ikinoki · 2022-05-17 00:52
Well, khm khm, freebsd use case is also pretty niche... 0.01%?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
codevirtuoso · 2022-05-18 20:24
That is my major issue with DO removing their images is that they do
not support IPV6 with custom.
I will be going elsewhere for that reason even though I can use an
image of my current droplet to create new ones supporting IPV6. It is
a pain to have to do multiple upgrades when I could just reinstall a
droplet using one of their images.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-21 20:23
>> On the default configuration ZFS will use half of your RAM for
cache. …
> Yes …
No, not half by default.
Please see
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-22 06:44
Thanks,
> https://klarasystems.com/freebsd-development/
/u/AntoineDarquier you might like to remove that one line from your
list. From :
> Klara Systems does not offer VPS hosting
----------------------------------------------------------------------
grahamperrin · 2022-05-22 07:59
Cross-reference:
* [How to upload a FreeBSD custom image on DigitalOcean – Admin… by ac
cident!](https://old.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/uv6aab/how_to_uploa
d_a_freebsd_custom_image_on/)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ashnur · 2023-04-13 09:09
>Netcup.eu
I think you can import images still. Haven't yet tried it.