NickF
Guru
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2014
- Messages
- 763
Copied from my Reddit post
I should have titled this A Fanboi's Overly Emotional response to recent releases...
TLDR; I love TrueNAS but I am concerned about the future.
I've been using FreeNAS since 2014. At that time, I was nothing more but a nerd looking for a place to store his movie collection. Since, I have become an IT manager for a very large school district. I've used FreeNAS in a variety of ways both personally and professionally, but I have only ever been a consumer of this technology. I am grateful for all of the hard work and efforts that have gone into making TrueNAS a stable and reliable product, and even more grateful for the fact that it's entirely free and open source.
However, I am a bit concerned about several recent releases and trends from the IX Systems team over the past couple of years and I am worried that the developers are repeating the same mistakes of their collective pasts. Whoever is reading this should have no reason to listen to anything I have to say, but I feel motivated to say it anyway.
A few years back, iX Systems CTO Jordan Hubbard (ex-Director of UNIX Technologies at Apple, Co-Founder of FreeBSD project) dedicated a substantial amount of resources to the development of what was then called FreeNAS 10 and became known as FreeNAS Corral. During late 2016 and early 2017 several betas and RCs became available. It introduced Docker support for the first time and a host of exciting features that home users were excited about. IX Systems released this platform on March 15th of 2017. Jordan later wrote a 1-week sitrep on what his perspectives of the release were. It seems there were certainly bugs, and that there was substantial backlash on various aspects of the release. There also appears to have been a factional division inside of the company, rallying around current SVP of Engineering, Kris Moore. This division arose from the fact that there was already two development teams, one focusing on FreeNAS 9.x and the other on Corral. It seems that Kris's faction won out.
Less than a month later, an announcement was made:
The IX Systems Executive team, and the developers under Kris Moore's leadership went on to undo the damage done by the Corral release. Based on Jordan Hubbard's announcement, he must have known that, from his perspective, they were about to "throw the baby out with the bath water". They focused on introducing new and exciting features into the old codebase without compromising on stability, performance or security. From my perspective, I was disappointed as a casual home user, but as a technology professional I was happy to see that cooler heads seemed to have prevailed. After this, the release of FreeNAS 11 came fairly quickly, replacing both the legacy and Corral UI with what is still the basis of the current UI today. Continued development rolled several Corral features into the 11.x codebase.
Now that we are done rehashing ancient information let us focus on what has transpired since. In the more recent past, we got single-pane of glass management with TrueCommand. Work on the ZFS codebase was merged into the product. Then we got news that iXSystems was shaking things up again. It seems that while they had merged much of the development teams that were dedicated to Corral vs 9.x, when the developed 11, they had diverged again. This time, supporting two different code bases with TrueNAS Entperise on one side and FreeNAS on the other. Kris Moore made the decision to resolve that, and simplify their development merging the code bases for TrueNAS 12, in March of 2020. But that decision was either very short lived or an outright lie.
In June of 2020, Kris Announced TrueNAS SCALE. While TrueNAS 12 and TrueNAS 13 were fantastic, stable and feature rich releases, SCALE seemed to be an ambitious attempt to capture the enthusiasm that Corral once garnered. Now iXSystems was going to be a player in not just storage, but adopting the hyperconverged, highly available and highly scalable platform model.
I cannot deny that the potential for Scale is astronomical. I am currently running it in my home environment and have migrated much of my servers and services off of ESXI. But, like Corral, it feels so completely unfinished, unstable and rushed out the door. Certainly, if a re-write of the FreeNAS codebase was the goal, SCALE is what Corral should have been 5 years ago in its design and principles. For about 18 months, SCALE was under development through various code reviews and milestones. In October of 2021 IXSystem released a roadmap outlining expected releases following a schedule based on internal projections. In February of 2022, Kris announced that they were going to release the first "GA" version of SCALE, codenamed Angelfish.
I do not deny that the Angelfish release works fairly well, albeit with several quirks, updates and hotpatches that have been released since. But even with that it's release was months premature, with one of its key features "Clustered SMB" not being officially released until August 2nd 2022. Even that, it's current implementation is arguably not very useful, and encourages users with poor defaults. With us now on version SCALE 22.02.2 this is supposed to be considered "Suitable for higher uptime deployments". and has gone through several QA cycles. However, we can still see it's not up to snuff on performance and even IXSystems own roadmap doesn't expect most of the truly differentiating features to be available until codename "Bluefin" is released.
Why all of the hype? Why all of the rushed releases? I want to be able to use TrueNAS SCALE in lieu of Proxmox, XCPNG, or even ESXI for workloads that actually matter. All of the hype makes it seem like it can do that, but it's simply not ready to. SCALE Angelfish should not be considered a production grade release, and in and of itself should be considered a beta of Bluefin. I am not a developer, and perhaps that parlance is incorrect for what you are doing. As a sysadmin and a long time user and supporter of this community, I am concerned. Marketing SCALE as a stable product when it is no where near feature complete is a mistake that is damaging the credibility of the brand, just like Corral did not 5 years before it. All of the headway you've made over the past half decade into actual enterprises and real customers is meaningless if you lose their trust with poor marketing.
I should have titled this A Fanboi's Overly Emotional response to recent releases...
TLDR; I love TrueNAS but I am concerned about the future.
I've been using FreeNAS since 2014. At that time, I was nothing more but a nerd looking for a place to store his movie collection. Since, I have become an IT manager for a very large school district. I've used FreeNAS in a variety of ways both personally and professionally, but I have only ever been a consumer of this technology. I am grateful for all of the hard work and efforts that have gone into making TrueNAS a stable and reliable product, and even more grateful for the fact that it's entirely free and open source.
However, I am a bit concerned about several recent releases and trends from the IX Systems team over the past couple of years and I am worried that the developers are repeating the same mistakes of their collective pasts. Whoever is reading this should have no reason to listen to anything I have to say, but I feel motivated to say it anyway.
A few years back, iX Systems CTO Jordan Hubbard (ex-Director of UNIX Technologies at Apple, Co-Founder of FreeBSD project) dedicated a substantial amount of resources to the development of what was then called FreeNAS 10 and became known as FreeNAS Corral. During late 2016 and early 2017 several betas and RCs became available. It introduced Docker support for the first time and a host of exciting features that home users were excited about. IX Systems released this platform on March 15th of 2017. Jordan later wrote a 1-week sitrep on what his perspectives of the release were. It seems there were certainly bugs, and that there was substantial backlash on various aspects of the release. There also appears to have been a factional division inside of the company, rallying around current SVP of Engineering, Kris Moore. This division arose from the fact that there was already two development teams, one focusing on FreeNAS 9.x and the other on Corral. It seems that Kris's faction won out.
Less than a month later, an announcement was made:
And Jordan Hubbard announced he was leaving the company.The Announcements section has an important announcement about the future of FreeNAS Corral.tl;dr - It has no future, but don't worry - its major features are all going to make their way to FreeNAS 9.10
The IX Systems Executive team, and the developers under Kris Moore's leadership went on to undo the damage done by the Corral release. Based on Jordan Hubbard's announcement, he must have known that, from his perspective, they were about to "throw the baby out with the bath water". They focused on introducing new and exciting features into the old codebase without compromising on stability, performance or security. From my perspective, I was disappointed as a casual home user, but as a technology professional I was happy to see that cooler heads seemed to have prevailed. After this, the release of FreeNAS 11 came fairly quickly, replacing both the legacy and Corral UI with what is still the basis of the current UI today. Continued development rolled several Corral features into the 11.x codebase.
Now that we are done rehashing ancient information let us focus on what has transpired since. In the more recent past, we got single-pane of glass management with TrueCommand. Work on the ZFS codebase was merged into the product. Then we got news that iXSystems was shaking things up again. It seems that while they had merged much of the development teams that were dedicated to Corral vs 9.x, when the developed 11, they had diverged again. This time, supporting two different code bases with TrueNAS Entperise on one side and FreeNAS on the other. Kris Moore made the decision to resolve that, and simplify their development merging the code bases for TrueNAS 12, in March of 2020. But that decision was either very short lived or an outright lie.
In June of 2020, Kris Announced TrueNAS SCALE. While TrueNAS 12 and TrueNAS 13 were fantastic, stable and feature rich releases, SCALE seemed to be an ambitious attempt to capture the enthusiasm that Corral once garnered. Now iXSystems was going to be a player in not just storage, but adopting the hyperconverged, highly available and highly scalable platform model.
I cannot deny that the potential for Scale is astronomical. I am currently running it in my home environment and have migrated much of my servers and services off of ESXI. But, like Corral, it feels so completely unfinished, unstable and rushed out the door. Certainly, if a re-write of the FreeNAS codebase was the goal, SCALE is what Corral should have been 5 years ago in its design and principles. For about 18 months, SCALE was under development through various code reviews and milestones. In October of 2021 IXSystem released a roadmap outlining expected releases following a schedule based on internal projections. In February of 2022, Kris announced that they were going to release the first "GA" version of SCALE, codenamed Angelfish.
I do not deny that the Angelfish release works fairly well, albeit with several quirks, updates and hotpatches that have been released since. But even with that it's release was months premature, with one of its key features "Clustered SMB" not being officially released until August 2nd 2022. Even that, it's current implementation is arguably not very useful, and encourages users with poor defaults. With us now on version SCALE 22.02.2 this is supposed to be considered "Suitable for higher uptime deployments". and has gone through several QA cycles. However, we can still see it's not up to snuff on performance and even IXSystems own roadmap doesn't expect most of the truly differentiating features to be available until codename "Bluefin" is released.
Why all of the hype? Why all of the rushed releases? I want to be able to use TrueNAS SCALE in lieu of Proxmox, XCPNG, or even ESXI for workloads that actually matter. All of the hype makes it seem like it can do that, but it's simply not ready to. SCALE Angelfish should not be considered a production grade release, and in and of itself should be considered a beta of Bluefin. I am not a developer, and perhaps that parlance is incorrect for what you are doing. As a sysadmin and a long time user and supporter of this community, I am concerned. Marketing SCALE as a stable product when it is no where near feature complete is a mistake that is damaging the credibility of the brand, just like Corral did not 5 years before it. All of the headway you've made over the past half decade into actual enterprises and real customers is meaningless if you lose their trust with poor marketing.