CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 5, 2009 19:31 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs by drag
Parent article: CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

The "free as in beer" Red Hat downloads got replaced by Fedora, mostly a name change at first. The problem is that what "enterprise" users want is radically different from what "hobby" users demand. Trying to please both just gets you into a bind, and infuriates everybody. Current state of affairs is near optimal, AFAICS: For personal use, you have Fedora (rapid development, always the latest gizmo ready to try/use); for non-critical servers you can run CentOS or Scientific Linux (Red Hat goes out of its way to make sure that building a clone distribution is easy by segregating branded stuff into a few easily replaced packages, they distribute full source even where they aren't forced to do so by the packages' license, most stuff developed in-house or even bought from third parties has been GPLed by them); if you need solid support you pay for it via Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 6, 2009 9:29 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (5 responses)

FWIW, I run Fedora on a server and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't need the OS to be 'certified' for Oracle or SAP or other expensive proprietary software. Every six months it takes about a day of my time to upgrade it, mostly spent in testing and in rebuilding any locally modified packages. If I had more than one server to maintain then of course I would need to spend some effort to automate and centralize the administration.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 7, 2009 1:28 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (4 responses)

We used to have Fedora on servers too, but the update timing became all wrong for us (smack in the most busy time in the term), so...

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 8, 2009 11:41 UTC (Sat) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link] (3 responses)

Even the Fedora project in the FC3 era understood that running their own infrastructure on Fedora was taking more resources than they could spend. That's when they moved to CentOS for their infrastructure instead.

Lots of Fedora developers also admit using CentOS for everything where they need stability or simply don't want to update every X months. There is no controversy anymore. It's the same codebase with a different deployment target (for the same audience).

Within companies you can also see companies mix CentOS and RHEL, depending on the support needs they have for different systems. Business or mission-critical solutions running on RHEL, and testing or development systems running on CentOS.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 8, 2009 20:30 UTC (Sat) by nirik (subscriber, #71) [Link] (2 responses)

I could be wrong, but I don't think Fedora infrastructure uses CentOS anywhere, they use
mostly RHEL and a few Fedora machines that need to be fedora for composes, etc.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 9, 2009 15:13 UTC (Sun) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link] (1 responses)

It doesn't matter, my point is still valid.

I said they moved from Fedora to CentOS in the FC3 era. It's possible they moved to RHEL. The point is that the Fedora project is not using Fedora for their servers. Whether it is CentOS or RHEL now is not relevant.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 9, 2009 20:01 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Actually, Fedora Project was just using external infrastructure which happened to be running something else at that point but yes, Fedora doesn't claim to be for everyone either.