Systemd vs. Docker

Posted Mar 3, 2016 20:04 UTC (Thu) by jcc1 (guest, #107291)
In reply to: Systemd vs. Docker by pizza
Parent article: Systemd vs. Docker

Red Hat's revenue-generating customers don't use Fedora, they use RHEL.

Exactly. Had RHEL (or broader EL community) users known what systemd was going to be allowed to turn into, and how deeply it'd be integrated into the base OS, and had a say, we'd have knifed it before it started.

And I may be wasting my breath, but I'll also point out that systemd is far more useful on servers than laptops.

Hardly. Anyone who had a need for a service manager in EL-land had already solved that problem using one of the existing ones out there (daemontools, runit, xinetd, etc.), had scripted their own solution, was using script management for verification, or -- "mu" -- didn't want one running because they relied on the monitoring system to catch something being dead and they wanted to go in an investigate. For servers, 90% of systemd-as-an-init-system solves problems that servers don't have. 90% of systemd-as-everything-else (autofs, crond, ntpd) solves problems that had already been solved. Basically the only thing that systemd does well that was something that needed to be done better is cgroup management. But those who were using it heavily had often already decided on their own solutions. The churn of dealing with systemd wasn't worth that benefit.

(And, incidentally, RHEL7, with systemd, has now been out for about a year. RH's revenue-generating customers have yet to leave en masse)

Leave? No. Migrate to RHEL7? Anecdotally, there's a LOT of concern. I know a lot of shops that are staying with EL6 for the time being, and it's not just for the normal reason of "letting things shake out for a year". There are serious concerns with systemd's reliability and the philosophy behind it. The only places that are all-in with systemd from an EL perspective are those that are fully on board with containers. Even then, those who were most in need of stateless solutions (high performance compute clusters) already had solutions for running EL in stateless modes, and deploying / managing their images.

Systemd vs. Docker

Posted Mar 3, 2016 20:50 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

> Hardly. Anyone who had a need for a service manager in EL-land had already solved that problem

Not true. You're writing in an omniscient voice but you certainly aren't speaking for me. My team moved to RHEL 7 just for systemd. We're sick of process monitors and their bugs. (it's especially great when you discover your process monitor has a memory leak... good thing there are zillions to choose from.)

So far systemd has been better than I'd hoped. For deploying web services, it's easy to use, mature, and rock solid. Everyone on the team has gotten to know its config -- no need to learn how to work with some guys favorite tool.

Reliable as all hell. No way we'd go back.

> I know a lot of shops that are staying with EL6 for the time being

And I know a lot of shops that are still on 5. Has nothing to do with systemd.

If you were to tone it down a bit, maybe I could understand what you're getting at... Right now, though, it seems like many of your statements are demonstrably false.

Systemd vs. Docker

Posted Mar 3, 2016 21:30 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> I know a lot of shops that are staying with EL6 for the time being, and it's not just for the normal reason of "letting things shake out for a year". There are serious concerns with systemd's reliability and the philosophy behind it.

Speaking for my employer, they're sticking with EL6 because the vendors of their business-criticial EDA tools haven't certified said tools for use with EL7 yet. Indeed, they are still using EL5 on some systems for similar reasons.

(We're talking about per-seat licensing costs in the upper five figures here. The actual RHEL license price is a rounding error, as is the hardware cost for all but the beefiest of boxes)

Systemd vs. Docker

Posted Mar 4, 2016 2:13 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> they are still using EL5 on some systems

I still have plenty of EL5 systems as well, for most purposes its totally fine, feature complete. We will migrate in the future because our developers are getting tired of PERL 5.8.8 and would like to be able to use current libraries without trouble, other than that I can't think of any base OS improvement that is substantial, except for systemd, which I like because I'm tired of crappy init scripts or people just running things out of rc.local.