That is, why this site is good. People who know what ZFS is and used it before, also get immediately the point of the site.
This site does not try explain ZFS to newbies, which makes it very concise.
I think it is not the purpose of this site to explain somebody how ZFS works, because this is simply just not done in 2 sentences. You need some hours and days to get the idea of ZFS.
Hashicorp is great but should really start adding some real-world-sysadmin language to their websites.
Every piece of tech is generally worth the time investment, but you have to trust them and start learning the tool before you can realise what it actually does.
Consul is one such case...
Consul is much more than DNS of course, but at the core it's DNS.
Unless you describe it as fancy DNS with extra features, it's description page doesn't make much sense.
>Hashicorp is great but should really start adding some real-world-sysadmin language to their websites.
Oh yes Hashicorp is great please don't get me wrong, but if you just read that landing-page it's like WTF. But if you know what Hashi is doing and read the Documentation just a little bit everything becomes clear...but that page alone just sounds like pure Marketing blabla cloud stuff.
I think engineers know the reputation of hashicorp products at this point. The marketing site is for the C-suite people, documentation is for the technical people.
FWIW, their documentation pages [1] are actually a great landing page for technical readers. The comparison to other software is pretty good for "grounding" consul into your other infra.
I've used Consul, Vault, Vagrant and Terraform so far and all of them are worth the time investment (Nomad is on the todo-list but for personal reasons I cannot play with it right now).
It'd be great if Hashicorp used less marketing bs and provided a clearer description... At first I glanced the Vault description, didn't really understand what it was supposed to do and walked away thinking "I probably don't need it". Which is bad because once I started using it I really loved it.
If you don’t understand it, maybe that was intentional on their part to not do business with you. It’s not a successful path in all cases, but if you have a niche product targeting a small audience, I can see value in what they did.
If you don't understand how you may need their service, you do not need their service. I'd welcome being proven wrong, but I would bet money there's not a single customer they're missing by their current front page.
The only way you, as a person not knowing what ZFS is, would have any use of their service is if you, after explanation, are so motivated to pay them money that you change your own data hosting to match a service you previously didn't know you needed even if stumbling over it.
1. Near-zero conversions. If you aren't already using ZFS, you aren't going to start just to use this service. And If you do use ZFS, you likely know what `zfs send` does.
2. The few conversions that do happen are almost certain to be high-maintenance.
I use ZFS on my NAS at home so presumably I am the target audience. What I failed to learn:
1. What OS is this whole thing running?
2. How many drives do I get? What’s the point of ZFS on a single drive? Is this just a way for me to temporarily hold a file system?
3. I don’t remember all the flags for the various zfs/zpool commands so the example command means little to me. This seems to be the main thing explaining what the service is for, yet I would have to go and look at the man pages to figure out what it does. Best I can tell: I can send my whole filesystem from my local NAS to my drive in the sky, but why would I want to do that?
4. Why do I get root access to the box? And if that’s the case, why do I need it?
5. What are the details of the data center they are in? Or the ___location? Or how did they arrive at their 99.999% reliability?
I have a pretty low attention span, but know the answer to several of those questions without even having to go back to the page (though I will, for the sake of argument). This might not be the case for everyone, but for the way I consume information, the product is described pretty well.
1. What OS is this whole thing running?.
Listed under "storage" section:
OpenZFS + CentOS 8.2 (maintence support until 2029)
OpenZFS + Ubuntu 20.04 (maintence support until 2025)
2. How many drives do I get? What’s the point of ZFS on a single drive? Is this just a way for me to temporarily hold a file system?
Listed under the "storage" section:
We rent out KVM virtual machines with dedicated 8-TB hard drives.
Listed under "pricing model" section:
Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.
3. I don’t remember all the flags for the various zfs/zpool commands so the example command means little to me. This seems to be the main thing explaining what the service is for, yet I would have to go and look at the man pages to figure out what it does. Best I can tell: I can send my whole filesystem from my local NAS to my drive in the sky, but why would I want to do that?
`zfs send` isn't exactly an exotic command, and while I can't blame you for not knowing each and every flag, does that matter? The site clearly states that you have a raw disk passed through to a KVM machine, which is pre-configured in a storage pool, but that you can configure it however you wish.
4. Why do I get root access to the box? And if that’s the case, why do I need it?
I agree that the unmanaged aspect of the service should perhaps be more prominently highlighted, but the site clearly states that you configure the machine however you like. To do that, root access is needed.
5. What are the details of the data center they are in? Or the ___location? Or how did they arrive at their 99.999% reliability?
I agree that more information about the data center would be relevant. The ___location of the DC is listed under "set-up time" section (Sacramento).
The OS options are listed. The pricing is clearly per disk, and "Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.". Backup. With root access you can do whatever you want with your system, including (as the page mentions) non-ZFS things.
