This is a big one, we have quite a few things to announce today. First of all we’ll be releasing Project-FiFo 0.7.0! This is the so far biggest and best release in our history. It has a bunch of new features, improvements and perhaps most importantly an entirely re-worked UI. Second we are happy to announce that we will be offering commercial support for both public and private clouds run with FiFo! Lets look a bit in the details. [Read more…]
The stack we choose: Erlang, SmartOS, Clojure
Often we hear that Project FiFo uses an unusual technology stack. Looking at the past few years of development experience, the stack has proven to be a positive one that continues to prove itself to be the right choice. The following should serve as a rationale for the choices behind each component, and some of the experiences we have had along the way.
The OS
We choose to run all FiFo and related services on SmartOS, the reason for this is simple. Since FiFo manages SmartOS clouds – it would be silly not to “eat our own dog food” and to run FiFo on something else.
We use vanilla SmartOS, so that there is no dependency on FiFo for your running VM’s. You could just switch FiFo off and all your VM’s would continue to just work. It also [Read more…]
Backups With Project FiFo
I want to talk about one of the lesser known features of Project FiFo: Backups. FiFo has supported backups as far back as version 0.4.3. While not widely used, it is one of those features that can save your butt when things go seriously south.
FiFo’s Backups feature compliments the snapshot ability that has been in the system for quite some time now. While snapshots must remain on the hypervisor itself, backups are shipped to LeoFS storage. This has many benefits, it limits the number of snapshots, does not count against the local quota, and also protects against many different types of failures.
FiFo supports both full and incremental backups. Here are a few limitations and [Read more…]
