MongoDB quits Solaris, wants to work on an OS people actually use

MongoDB has killed off its Solaris development efforts. The company's director of platform engineering Andrew Morrow calls the decision “bittersweet,” but says “lack of adoption among our user base” made the decision easy and necessary.

“Of our commercial users, we knew of only a handful who had ever been running on Solaris, and all confirmed that they had migrated away, or were in the process of doing so,” he writes. “Our download numbers for our Solaris builds confirmed this lack of interest, as did stats gathered from our managed operations tools.”

Morrow also says that the company doesn't think it is a good idea to invest in Solaris expertise. “While several of our senior developers know their way around Solaris well, our junior devs have never touched it. Investing in teaching them is of questionable value,” he writes.

Oracle isn't helping: Morrow says one of the difficulties MongoDB has encountered is figuring out Solaris' future, which he describes as “murky at best.” That's a reference to Oracle's decision to bin Solaris 12 in favor of rolling updates to Solaris 11.3.

“While no single one of these issues seems sufficient on its own to argue for terminating support for Solaris, when combined with the observed lack of interest or use, it makes for a compelling case,” Morrow writes. “We would rather invest our time and effort developing for the platforms that our users actually use. So, with some real sadness and fond memories, we have decided to say goodbye to Solaris.”

Morrow says the decision means that: “Effective immediately, we plan to cease production of new builds of MongoDB for Solaris, across all supported versions of MongoDB. Existing release artifacts for Solaris will continue to be made available, but no new releases will be issued, barring a critical issue raised under an existing support contract covering MongoDB versions 3.0 through 3.4 running on Solaris.” ®