> Zones however are superior to VM’s because they don’t require hard pre-allocation of resources like virtual machines do, so they are a superior choice in environments where Windows isn’t desired or required.

In public cloud that's not a problem, that's a requirement, so one VM wouldn't trash all its neighbors.

That is what containers are for. On SmartOS a container is used to constrain resource limits of a zone, but if a zone is using less than the limits it’s more efficient in terms of hardware. However, if one is not using this technology, one is forced to hard partition with virtual machines.

> As for my Linux hate, if Linux were so great and well made, I wouldn’t hate it.

With Linux running on ~10^11 devices, everything from watches to supercomputers to the Falcon 9 rocket, the market disagrees with you to a pretty comical extent.

Historia est magistra vitae. When have the masses ever been correct?

I dunno, most of the time? They some years ago decided learning Latin was pointless, for example.

Masses have always been wrong, to the extent that they burned and killed innocent people for one reason or another. No mass has ever produced any innovation; if you look at revolutionary inventions, they were always invented by single persons or very small, focused group of individuals, but never masses. Masses don't have the competence to judge whether that which they are following is good or bad, correct or incorrect. That's why they follow. It's what defines them as a mass.

As for Latin, this is the same reasoning of "learning" Linux and not understanding UNIX and mis-configuring the OS or breaking Linux backwards compatibility. Or re-inventing the wheel all the time while basic functionality like booting or the fiberchannel stack still do not work correctly after 20+ years.

Thank you masses for all the sleepless nights I was forced to endure because Linux has the same problems Solaris solved decades ago. Because masses know what's good and what's bad.

You're arguing one edge of a very much double-edged sword, and I must say (as someone that was deploying the linux-vserver patches by at least 2004) it's incredibly tiring to watch.

Yes there is definitely a way to praise alternatives without railing against the current discussion topic.

Some may appreciate being made aware of another technology; unfortunately this specific example reinforces the importance of marketing and pursuing mindshare.

No less tiring than reading about re-inventing virtualization in Linux. For both of us the fix is the same: either don’t read it or remark how tiresome it is.

Where we both agree is that it’s tiresome, but for very different reasons.

You do understand how unsuitable zones are in a public cloud like AWS, right? Why are you even having this discussion.

Perhaps it is because given technical capability, I cannot understand why Amazon is even being discussed when it is technically inferior to what Joyent offers and Amazon is the most expensive provider.

> I cannot understand why...

Sounds to me that your understanding is the real problem here. There are a lot of resources you can use to read up on the value proposition, and while I do think AWS is pretty expensive and perhaps priced a bit too high, it's a great platform that goes way beyond just the speed of the VM tech.