The Future of Electric Eel and Apps

Announcements
7

I would like to thank @HoneyBadger for this post giving us all an insight into the thinking that is happening inside ixSystems. I think that the general consensus is that Docker Compose will be better than K3s (simpler, less overhead) so this seems like an excellent long-term choice.

A few immediate comments that come to mind:

  1. The automatic migration of TrueNAS Chart apps from K3S to Docker sounds really good - and IMO ixSystems deserve a real plaudit for putting the effort into achieving this.

  2. I appreciate that ixSystems don’t want to continue to support (i.e. put costly effort into) K3s. So although it might be nice for ixSystems to support a release in which both existing K3s apps are supported in parallel with the new Docker infrastructure, I can fully understand why they don’t want to do this.

  3. It is unclear whether Electric Eel will support 3rd party docker app catalogues in the same way that 3rd party Helm catalogues like TrueCharts are currently supported. Or indeed whether such support would be needed over and above support for checking whether custom docker / composer images have been updated and offering admins the chance to update. But if it is needed, such support would seem to me to be relatively simple.

  4. Alternatively it might be nice if ixSystems were to consider providing a community catalogue (say based on a Github repo) where community members could define docker apps which utilise the standard GUI functionality for TrueNAS apps. This could be administered by either ixSystems or by senior community members and would be a way to get the breadth of apps that TrueCharts provide without having a

  5. We will need to see what TrueCharts response will be to this. But they seem to be more interested in supporting Helm charts globally than supporting TrueNAS specifically, so I suspect that they are most likely to twilight the TrueNAS SCALE Catalogue support (and close it once Dragonfish goes out of support) and focus on other platforms.

  6. I would imagine that it would be possible for the community to continue to innovate around Jailmaker and to provide:

    • A console-based UI for Jailmaker which helps users create Jails (akin to the Jail wizard in CORE??)
    • Automated Jailmaker install for K3s
    • Support for 3rd party Helm catalogues (such as TrueCharts)
    • Some sort of automated script to migrate TrueCharts apps from Dragonfish inbuilt K3s to K3s in a Sandbox.

Finally, now that we have this announcement, I think it might be useful if someone more experienced than me could write a couple of complementary Forum posts to this one, giving:

  • Recommendations for new users on whether to use TrueCharts apps at all now that this has been announced. To me it would seem sensible to switch to a matching TrueNAS Chart app if one is available but in many cases the choice now is TrueCharts with a GUI and update support, or Jailmaker/Docker using a command line and manual editing of compose files etc. and possible manual updates via the command line too.

  • A practical overview of how users should deal with their existing TrueCharts K3s applications perhaps with a few options (migrate to TrueNAS equivalent apps, migrate to Docker in a Sandbox, migrate to K3s in a Sandbox etc.) and then have a list somewhere of which option is recommended for each TrueCharts package.

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