From Azure Functions to FreeBSD

(jmmv.dev)
23 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | 08 Dec 25 08:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.596s | source
1. adamddev1 ◴[08 Dec 25 14:51 UTC] No.46192853[source]▶
Nice move and nice write-up! There has been so much propaganda around serverless, so we need to hear more of these voices.

I moved away from FreeBSD to Debian for hosting my things because the process/daemon management was too tricky. You seem to have figured out a good solution, but I wanted something simpler like PM2 for automatic process management/restarting/logs. Unfortunately PM2 has an issue [1] that makes it unworkable with FreeBSD. It would be so nice if FreeBSD had a smooth, more declarative way of managing processes.

1. https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/issues/5718

replies(1): >>46195168 #
2. jmmv ◴[08 Dec 25 17:37 UTC] No.46195168[source]▶
Thanks!

> I moved away from FreeBSD to Debian for hosting my things because the process/daemon management was too tricky.

It indeed is tricky. To be honest, I wasn't "put off" by it because I've been using BSDs and old-style Linux startup systems for almost 30 years now... but the lack of abstraction shows, and I don't think it's great.

The daemon(8) wrapper is neat to integrate pre-existing servers into rc.d, but I do not fancy having to deal with that "by hand" nor to create a shell script to manage my own service (related from a few years ago: https://jmmv.dev/2020/08/rcd-libexec-etc.html) nor to have something entirely separate to manage log rotation.

As much hate as systemd gets, I do think being declarative (and doing so in a DSL that's not a programming language) and having a true process "supervisor" is a better model. BUT, as I mentioned in this article, I also like the "no churn" of the BSDs because what I learned and refined over ~30 years is still similar to this day and that I won't be bitten by surprises.