SmartOS. It's reliable, powerful and super fast.

Created by Martijn Hengelmolen at 07-12-2017 14:10:46 +0100

The latest release of Cloudcontainers enables users to deploy SmartOS containers. A distribution designed specifically for cloud computing based on the Solaris/Illumos heritage. 

Well, what does it mean for an operating system to be designed for cloud computing? Well, SmartOS will maky you feel as if you are the only one using the system. SmartOs is designed from the your perspective, and has to be:

  • fast: minimizing the time it takes for an operation to complete
  • flexible: with automatic bursting and easy scaling
  • secure: You never never have to worry about what your neighbors are doing

Here are several other key benefits where SmartOS beats the competition:


Users of Illumos and FreeBSD know that Dtrace gives you an unprecedented view of what's going on throughout the software stack. In SmartOS, this allows operators to observe and troubleshoot across all the zones and nodes. In cloudcontainers we have harnessed the power of DTrace in a more user-friendly form with live stats, allowing unparalleled observability of your systems performance.


SmartOS is made more reliable by:

  • Fault management: "fine-grained fault isolation and restart where possible of any component — hardware or software — that experiences a problem. To do so, the system must include intelligent, automated, proactive diagnoses of errors that are observed on the system. The diagnosis system is used to trigger targeted automated responses or guided human intervention that mitigates a specific problem or at least prevents it from getting worse."


Solaris has long been the operating system of choice in highly secure data centers, thanks to several features which SmartOS inherits. SmartOS zones, though they share system resources such as CPU and disk space, simply cannot see each other. Users in a multi-tenant environment are thus protected from each other; your neighbor's security lapse will not affect your zone. Data security is also ensured: no byte of data from one customer is shared with any other customer, now or later, because:

  • A zone can only see its own network traffic.
  • Disk storage is accessed only via ZFS file systems, never raw devices. Each SmartMachine has its own file system and does not even know of the existence of any other.
  • A user has no access to raw memory devices, so can't scan system memory.

Upon deletion of a SmartMachine, the file system is destroyed and there is no device path by which a future customer could access any data left over in that file system. 

DDOS mitigation

A SmartMachine is protected from DDOS attacks by some of the same features that guarantee that it gets a fair share of system resources: fair share scheduler, caps, process limits, rcapd, swap cap, disk file system limits, quota limits. By capping each zone's resource usage, SmartOS ensures that, even under heavy attack, a zone will not bring down its neighbors.


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