Farewell, Solaris

I&#x27;m one of the Product Managers at MongoDB and I was a part of making this decision. It seems like there are two main areas where people are asking for more information: 1) exactly what are the numbers of Solaris downloads and 2) what about security patches of existing versions? I&#x27;m happy to clarify those points here and we will be posting an update to the blog to include this information.<p>Based on the data we have, about 0.06% (and decreasing) of MongoDB users are running on Solaris. In addition, as Andrew mentioned in the blog, all of our customers have either deprecated Solaris or have told us they plan to deprecate it.<p>In regards to security patches on Solaris, we will continue to fix critical flaws for the community, regardless of where found or how reported. Anyone can report a security vulnerability by using our Security project (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jira.mongodb.org&#x2F;browse&#x2F;SECURITY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jira.mongodb.org&#x2F;browse&#x2F;SECURITY</a>) to create an account then a ticket describing the vulnerability.

&gt; The future of Oracle Solaris, perhaps the one true Solaris if you had to pick one, is murky at best.<p>I believe the article linked talking about &quot;the death of Oracle Solaris&quot; was shown to be FUD and over-zealous reporting, but ignoring that I don&#x27;t see why you would think Oracle no-longer-open-Solaris would be the &quot;one true Solaris if you had to pick one&quot;. illumos gained the majority of the development community from Oracle after the majority of the Solaris developers left, and most of the recent innovations in Solaris&#x27;s core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos.

I&#x27;ll admit to running Solaris on my desktop many years ago when it was still under Sun&#x27;s stewardship. It was the most accessible &#x27;real&#x27; UNIX for most people (being that it was free and able to run on x86). I also once had a job working on an old Ada codebase that had us stuck on SPARC&#x2F;Solaris 8 (in the late 2000s :O). It makes me sad to see what Oracle has done to it.<p>In any case, I suspect most users looking for a more &#x27;authentic&#x27; UNIX flavor than Linux have shifted over to *BSD (My home file server runs FreeBSD -- mostly for the ZFS support -- hey, at least a file system from Solaris-land will live on).

It&#x27;s ironic that ecosystem fragmentation is now a legitimate reason to drop Solaris when fragmentation had for a long time been a major concern for supporting Linux.

Interesting that one of the reasons for their dropping Solaris support is &quot;Operational difficulties.&quot; The same would also be valid reason for saying &quot;Farewell&quot; to Mongodb.<p>Anyone that&#x27;s had to manage a MongoDB database could tell you about regularly having to manually re-synch their secondaries, manually having to run compactions to manage disk space(the power of 2 allocator), the automatic &quot;balancer&quot; process that sends I&#x2F;O the roof, the rollback files etc. I think MongoDB being so operationally difficult is the prime reason that MongoDB offers a managed MongoDB PaaS offering.

I have a lot of nostalgia for Solaris and Irix circa 2000. They had their uses and places, especially when coupled with SGI and Sun hardware. I think mostly the reason its nostalgic is that it reminds me of a &quot;golden age&quot; (late 1970&#x27;s to mid-1990&#x27;s?) of accessible computing when computers were still the domain of nerds.

Solaris has, historically, been my favorite operating system. I started using it when Sun made Solaris 7 available for free to anyone who requested it when I was in college. I still remember receiving a package in the mail with a nice set of packaged CDs and documentation! My college had standardized on Unix for development for homework assignments, and Linux at the time still seemed &quot;immature&quot; to me. I loved the stability and sanity I found with Solaris, and even saved up money to beef up my home PC so that it could run better (SCSI hard drives, more RAM, etc.) I used it up through version 10, but once Oracle took control and de-open-sourced it, I knew that was the beginning of the end.

Anyone smart enough to use SmartOS is not dumb enough to use MongoDB so nothing was lost.

Meanwhile in the comment section of this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15124306" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15124306</a> HackerNews MongoDB article basically everyone (who speaks up at least) seems to agree that the drawbacks of NoSQL outweigh the benefits.

I wish they gave actual numbers on how few people were downloading Solaris builds.

What happens when security vulnerabilities are patched in a supported version of MongoDB? Will Solaris users simply never get those patches? The blog doesn&#x27;t say that I could see.

Unsurprising. As far as I can see Solaris is pretty much retreating into being in the same position as zOS (MVS): something Oracle ship with the integrated hardware stacks.