Distributions and Operating Systems: NixOS and FreeBSD
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Xe's Blog ☛ Much ado about "nothing"
Keep in mind that I'm not decrying the tech behind Nix or NixOS as wrong here. My gripes are purely with community management, moderation, and all of the soft squishy stuff that comes with dealing with humans.
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BSD
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FreeBSD ☛ Netflix Case Study
As Smirnoff notes, Netflix’s Open Connect originally operated on a standard FreeBSD platform, which was gradually improved for better performance. In 2012, a proof-of-concept CDN was started on vanilla FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE and nginx that was provisioned on servers equipped with a single 10 Gbit/s interface.
Over time, it became evident that achieving rapid growth required exceeding the limits of the operating system’s current capabilities. The expected scale of Netflix’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) was so massive that it was worthwhile to invest in the ongoing open source development of FreeBSD.
Netflix realized that when deploying a CDN at a global scale, even a single percentage point increase in performance results in savings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Netflix’s customized version of FreeBSD enabled deeper integration and more precise optimization at the kernel level, leading to significant performance improvements.
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