Hi Morgan,
Sorry for my insomnia riddled response. As always, I appreciate your candor and all of the help you provide here on these forums.
Onto the discussion.
I understand that there has to be a version 1.0. That goes for any software product, whether it be open source or not. I get that benchmarks are needed so that you know where to drive development. You need to size your teams appropriately based on those numbers and any corresponding projected income from business users that may be attributed to the ongoing success of the free version.
You identified that the target audience of the release should be nerds like us here on the forums or on Reddit. Folks who are intelligent enough to help test and report bugs and folks who just want to run a single node with some Docker containers and have some storage that's safe and reliable.
What percentage of that
target audience, which you define as over 20,000 systems, were expected to use MinIO and what percentage is actively using it?
Without clustered Kubernetes support, what is the use case? Same question for Gluster native, without having SMB clustering, what's the point? How many users actually had a use case that couldn't have just been resolved with ZFS replication?
With the release of TrueCommand yesterday, we got SMB clustering, several months after launch. But even that, in it's current form
has serious limitations. If I have a dataset I want clustered, but I have another dataset I don't have enough space to cluster on my other systems, I can't leverage the feature. Having to choose between cluster and breaking all of my other existing shares is a really tough pill to swallow. What's worse is that in
the video it a warning that flies in from no where and is quickly glossed over.
Same goes with iSCSI, NFS, etc. Why bother having clustered storage if you cannot multipath your I/O between more than one system? You mention KVM, even if external systems can't access the clustered pools, surely we should have been able to create highly available VMs. This functionality has been in Proxmox for years, shouldn't that have been in the release? In the absence of all of these things,
what good is a scale-out system if none of the underlying technologies in the platform can utilize it.
It’s like you guys built a really cool car. But you forgot to put the passenger seat in, the backseats are missing, and you don’t have any carpet. You have a great sound system, nice wheels and tires, and even a fairly strong engine. But you can’t enjoy it with anyone else, and you can’t bring your kids to school. You don’t just need to tune the engine and adjust the feel of the suspension. You need to finish the car.
As a follow up coming from a different direction, I'm confused about the goal here. By supporting the single-node model well, you have indeed created a larger user testing base. But what percentage of the testing base you've defined will ever SCALE OUT? Your userbase of dudes like me who have racks in their homes is a fraction of what the larger overall userbase is. The other users will come, because there is a serious desire from alot of folks to be using Docker and Kubernetes as a professional learning platform or a hobby for fun things in their house.
But the actual users you need to impress are not those users, it's the business customers who will buy actual hardware and support contracts from you. It's those users who you are hurting by releasing a half-baked product, and it's those users who pay for the salaries of all of the folks at iXSystems. I am also one of those users, I've priced out buying IX Hardware for some video surveillance projects. The problem is that big name competitors are putting more and more downward pressure on the market.
When I go to my director and say I can buy a Lenovo DE system for the same money or less than an IX system, it's a hard sell. Now, with SCALE there are more differentiating features on the horizon, that sell is going to get easier. But I can't in good conscious tell him that I want to make a serious capital investment on a product that is fundamentally incomplete at this point....
I'm not asking you to, really. I'm just asking you not to call incomplete product "release".
That is totally understood, but not really my point. I understand the trouble with competing priorities. I think all of us in IT do, and I am also willing to wait for the pie to finish baking in the oven.
I've already staged my home environment for testing this winter or next spring, whenever you guys get around to releasing Bluefin. I've migrated all of my VMs save 1 off of my production VMWare box and into SCALE. I have a third box sitting in the rack waiting for a couple more pieces of storage. I'm actually very excited to see where this bus brings me.
My final words will be that I still think it’s a marketing problem. If you guys said from the onset that you were porting TRUENAS CORE from BSD to a Debian base, with the goal being solid KVM snd Docker support, we would all be singing the praises. You could have silently worked on the SCALE OUT pieces and announced them after the initial release as being part of version 2.0. But you called it SCALE, and talked about how awesome SCALE OUT is going to be. Then you released a product that doesn’t have any useful scale out features…. The timing and content of the product announcement and the fact that Angelfish 22.02.2 is advertised as a complete end product that is ready for business use is just not okay…
Thanks again!