It hardly does anything for FreeBSD in the enterprise world. Companies cannot afford to support Windows Server, Linux AND another flavor of UNIX (FreeBSD). They are already dumping Solaris/AIX/HP-UX as much as they can so environments are a bit more homogeneous (and easier to support). There is no point in onboarding FreeBSD for what they perceive as minor technical differences (that, truth be told, are overshadowed by dozens of layers of bureaucracy and any efficiency benefit is completely lost).
It took a long time and a giant ecosystem to get where Linux is today at big enterprises. OSes are commodities in that space. They are not commodities in many other spaces though (e.g. startups, HPC, science, etc).
> They are already dumping Solaris/AIX/HP-UX as much as they can so environments are a bit more homogeneous (and easier to support).
Whoever is pushing for this is an idiot then. Verisign, for example, has had 100% DNS uptime for the .net, .org, and .com root servers for ~15 years because of their mixed environments. In every one of their POPs they tend to have at least two racks of equipment with:
* 2 different brands of load balancers
* 2 different brands of firewalls
* 2 different brands of switches
* 2 different brands of servers
** servers are from different hardware generations
* 2 different OSes (Linux and FreeBSD)
* a choice from 3 different DNS server software
This is all pretty much randomized at each location. As a result, a bug in one piece of the stack (hardware, software, driver, security, etc) will not take down their service completely.
This is how you run a reliable global-scale service. Anyone who plays the "it's just easier if we all use ____" is in for a big surprise when their entire infrastructure is at risk due to one bug.
Facebook also uses PHP, the most reviled language around here. Google has a developer team to rewrite components and adapt the Linux kernel, consider that.
It's an unfair comparison in any case: DNS is "trivial" to keep up compared to even small fractions of Facebook and Google's infrastructure.
As long as a sufficient fraction of servers at a sufficient fraction of Verisigns clusters has an uncorrupted set of data and is able to serve responses, Verisigns TLD zones remain up.
Pretty much the only thing that can go wrong in that case, assuming you have safeguarded the integrity of the zone is bugs in components outside their direct control.
It makes 100% sense for them to focus their efforts on ensuring diversity, because the class of problems that can solve for them makes up an unusually high percentage of the possible failure classes, and the nature of the service also means that most of the potential problems that this can cause is only likely to take out some proportion of their capacity that still leaves them with a functional system, so the potential benefit is higher for them than for most with a heterogeneous, and the potential risks are lower for them than for most.
For Google and Facebook, the systems are so much more complex that the tradeoffs are vastly different.
There are very few heterogenic systems in the enterprise. That is an objective, but the main thing is that we deliver what we're paid to deliver by choosing an appropriate platform. We have Solaris, zSeries, Linux and Windows. We just got rid of AIX.
As for minor differences, FreeBSD has a lot of much bigger wins than people realise at first glimpse. The differences are far from minor. For example:
ZFS, dtrace, rctl, a scary good IP stack, virtio support, documentation that doesn't suck, a POSIX base, LLVM/clang, a MAC framework that doesn't suck, OpenBSM, CARP and a pile more. Oh plus an automated deployment story that is pretty tidy.
Sure we can replicate some of these on CentOS 7 for example with similar tech but the above are a million times more cohesive.
It took a long time and a giant ecosystem to get where Linux is today at big enterprises. OSes are commodities in that space. They are not commodities in many other spaces though (e.g. startups, HPC, science, etc).