Incidentally, I have been running such a comparison myself (yet another John here). I find project Fifo to be a dead end, with a compelling proposition but ultimately no greater efficiency and much higher administrative overhead than SDC, while SDC has higher initial infrastructure overhead but a more cohesive design, more accessible conventions, and simpler tools for administration, which together yield greater operational efficiency. The OP is asking about the admin portal for users, but I would feel very uncomfortable selecting a cloud platform on the basis of its GUI alone, especially after my experience with Fifo and SDC over the past several months.
Fifo administration involves components with non-semantic names, its own set of concepts and conventions, a distributed filesystem from another project with another set of concepts and conventions, and a backend system with yet another set of concepts and conventions, all on top of and in addition to the concepts and conventions of SmartOS. The resulting system is byzantine and heavily dependent on documentation, especially for an administrator new to cloud orchestration like me. It doesn't help that much of it has undergone substantial changes, understandable at its stage of development but a challenge for long-term support nonetheless. On the other hand, SDC is built using concepts and conventions of SmartOS itself (and has only a few silly names for things), so skills developed working with SmartOS immediately apply to SDC. The infrastructure requirements are nominally greater, but not really if you are designing a system for capacity and reliability. And once the infrastructure is in place, SDC maintenance and failure recovery follow the same paradigms, so issue response and routine operation are equally familiar and comfortable, with no "oh crap, erlang again" moments. And with occasional exceptions, updates are uniformly stable, reliable enhancements, and never wholesale reimplementations. So I've personally concluded that it is more worthwhile to develop a familiarity with SmartOS and SDC because my effort with SDC contributes more directly to my productivity. I find SDC's simple, easy-to-understand components result in a more elegant system than Fifo's more esoteric, purpose-oriented tools—much as I prefer boring, reliable, interchangeable LEGO bricks over all the myriad singleton themed pieces. I find SDC administration to be guessable and discoverable with incremental domain knowledge of SDC internals (meaning I can largely figure it out as I go along), while Fifo requires lots of understanding one thing in order to understand another—demanding a near-academic commitment to Fifo and its documentation, which I find loopy and oblique. In the end, I find Fifo's chief benefit to be a low cost of infrastructure that only hides deeper complexity and a higher overall cost in time and effort. I wish Fifo and its team all the best. It is an impressive project and is entitled to its opinions. But in my opinion, as an administrator, I find its grand visions commit it to challenges that outweigh its benefits. On Tuesday, January 12, 2016, George Mamalakis <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi John, > > I am also in the dilemma between FiFo and SDC and I was thinking of > setting up both of them and see which one suits better for our needs. First > off, I should say that we are a small software company in Greece and we > need the cloud infrastructure just (of about 10-15 hypervisors) for the > services we're providing, so we won't be offering VMs as a service. > > I have just deployed a FiFo installation of 2 hypervisors and I'm trying > to learn how it works, and since I'm very new at this, I had no idea that > in the future I'd have to learn erlang for troubleshooting/administering > FiFo. So, to your experience, is erlang a prerequisite for FiFo? > > Thanks for your info, > > George. > > -- > George Mamalakis > > IT and Security Officer, > Electrical and Computer Engineer (Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki), > PhD (Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki), > MSc (Imperial College of London) > > School of Electrical and Computer Engineering > Aristotle University of Thessaloniki > > phone number : +30 (2310) 994379 > > > > *smartos-discuss* | Archives > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/27750020-92655a4d> | > Modify > <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> > Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> > ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/25769125-55cfbc00 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=25769125&id_secret=25769125-7688e9fb Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
