• EnterpriseWorkingGroup

Enterprise Working Group

CHARTER

The mission of the Enterprise WG is to bring clarity to feature and other gaps that limit enterprise (e.g. business or end user) adoption of FreeBSD as a general-purpose server platform and provide a supportive group to help developers close these gaps. For our purposes, we are defining general purpose enterprise server as servers used by businesses and other organizations to support business applications and end users. Typical applications include Active Directory, Samba, kerberos, ERP and other apps often written in Java, and increasingly AI workloads and cloud native apps.

The Scope of the WG is: For the remainder of 2023, the WG will focus on the set of features identified initially and refined during the WG’s first meetings. The WG will also concern itself with onboarding a semi-permanent group of developers and users to look after the ongoing utility of FreeBSD for general purpose enterprise server workloads.

Our success metrics are:

• Staffed development plans for high priority projects
• Steady to growing number of WG participants who perform a growing diversity of tasks
• Feature updates in priority projects
• Greater utility by current enterprise users
• Increased adoption of FreeBSD as a general purpose enterprise server platform

• More support for FreeBSD by “critical” enterprise tech & resources, such as XDR vendors, CIS benchmarks

The deliverables are:

• Improved satisfaction among enterprise users
• Documentation of WG progress and deployment/use best practices
• WG community growth
• Growing support for FreeBSD by critical enterprise tech vendors

We operate according to the FreeBSD Code of Conduct

Status

Assess interest in an Enterprise WG

DONE: The Google Group now has 69 members

Charter the WG

DONE: See above

Compile list of gaps

DONE

Prioritize feature list

DONE

Assign/volunteer

IN PROCESS. See Workstreams below

Create phased plan

PLANNED, NOT STARTED

Participation

This group is open to anyone who would like to contribute in support of its charter. We are currently using Google Groups to communicate.

Please complete this form to register your interest. Enterprise WG Interest Form

We need all kinds of perspectives and expertise - developers, end users, project managers, testers. Questions please email greg at freebsdfoundation dot org

Our Next Workgroup Call

The next call has not been scheduled yet. Please sign up with the work group via the Enterprise WG Interest Form to receive the next meeting link.

The agenda for the next call:

• bhyve / jails manageability from Chris M
• OCI runtime from Greg W
• OpenJDK contractor status from me or Joe M
• GPU and AI support from Greg W

Workstreams

OCI runtime

• The following people have volunteered to help:
  • Johannes Kunde - end user, helping create the Product Requirements Document
  • John Hixson - Developer willing to help
  • Ian Evans - CTO of Metify - Developer and end user also weighing in on the PRD
  • Kyle Wilcox - Chief Software Architect of Metify - Developer
  • Doug Rabson - Developer

• Here is the link to the DRAFT PRD: OCI PRD

• Doug Rabson opened a PR on November 10 to propose an OCI Working Group to develop a FreeBSD runtime.

bhyve manageability

• The following people have volunteered to help:

  • Chris Moerz - PM

  • Michael Dexter - user and bhyve community manager

• Here is the link to the DRAFT PRD: bhyve management PRD

• Here is the link to the spreadsheet on desired features: Desired bhyve features

• Activities (see also Bhyve (and jails) management workstream)

  • Next steps are to complete the PRD.
  • Chris is interviewing end users and working on the PRD.

  • Plans to attend weekly bhyve call regularly - if you are interested in talking or joining the calls, please get in touch; my contact details are on my page.

  • Then we will move into discussion of how to improve manageability, including whether we should also address Jails manageability, how we can phase our work, etc.; as of beginning of November:
    • Jan B has started some experimental work for state management
    • There is ongoing conversations about improving snapshot file format for bhyve to help with future implementation of hot migration
    • Added some considerations thoughts as conversation starter for network handling across bhyve and jails

AD/DNS

• The following people have volunteered to help:
  • Michael Osipov - end user
  • Greg Wallace - PM
• Next step is to hold a kick-off call.

NVIDIA GPU support

• The following people have volunteered to help:
  • Vedran Miletic - end user
  • Zoran Vujovic - tester with Supermicro
  • Jason Morris - tester Azure
  • Greg Wallace - PM
  • Ian Evans - CTO of Metify - Developer and end user also weighing in on the PRD
  • Kyle Wilcox - Chief Software Architect of Metify - Developer
• Next step is to get a volunteer to drive the completion of the first draft of the PRD, collect feedback, update and finalize.

Java / OpenJDK

• The FreeBSD Foundation opened a position to bring on a contractor to do this work OpenJDK Contract

Samba 4.x

• The following people have volunteered to help:
  • Michael Osipov - end user
  • Greg Wallace - PM
  • John Hixson - developer
• Next step is to assess the patch situation and come up with a plan to approach upstream

• The FreeBSD Foundation is discussing how to get FreeBSD added to .NET CI so that GitHub Actions can support it

smbfs 2.0/3.0

• The FreeBSD Foundation is working on getting a donation of this code (code contribution, re-licensing under BSD license)

Resources

• Meeting Notes

• First meeting

  • slides

  • recording

• Second meeting

  • slides

  • recording

• Third meeting

  • slides

• Fourth meeting

  • included in the minutes

  • slides

  • recording

CategoryProject