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Having unified my work and homelab environments on RHEL/CentOS for north of ten years, I took the opportunity to try out some new options. We've begun the proc

Having unified my work and homelab environments on RHEL/CentOS for north of ten years, I took the opportunity to try out some new options. We've begun the process of switching out from CentOS to Amazon Linux at work, and the jump actually hasn't been difficult - the tooling is largely the same, boot times are vastly improved (I don't really know what Amazon does under the hood to their Linux distro, but it does show), and with minor changes to some Ansible bootstrap code, we're up and running. Besides, most everything is containers nowadays. My homelab has come full circle - it started out on Debian back in the 2000s (it was the only distro left with a floppy installer, and I had a few Pentium-class laptops). These days it's a shelf full of single-board computers, and I've found the support for Debian types like Raspbian/Armbian to be _much_ improved over CentOS, whose ARM32 special interest group was but a handful of people volunteering their spare time. What have others been migrating to?

second--shift 5y ago
I’ve been using Fedora server to good success. My home servers only last about a year or two before i need to tinker & change things. I don’t need 5 yrs of lts support in the OS - 2 yrs of fedora is fine. We use rhel at work & have always paid for the licenses.
Kostic 5y ago
Kubernetes and managed AWS services for production workloads. Fedora Workstation for everything else.
csdvrx 5y ago
Funny, I went the other way with debian and ubuntu as they are close-ish enough to have a similar setup in prod and on my laptop with wsl (and now I'm evaluating PopOS) Your homelab experiences with SBC seems to validate my position. The only use I have for CentOS is to compile Ventoy
tehbeard 5y ago
> (I don't really know what Amazon does under the hood to their Linux distro, but it does show) If it's on AWS hardware I assume they've extremely trimmed down any and all kernel gubbins that isn't related to the hardware they run on? As for our migration plans... Well luckily we're on CentOS 7, so I have a year or so more to figure that one out and see what way the wind blows. Timings good enough to do a hardware refresh at the same time. Kinda worried for Ansible to be completely honest. I've grown to love it for automating a bunch of sysadmin tasks and managing some stuff at work and my own kit, It's been a nice way to spin up dev boxes w/o going down the whole Kube/Container stack when a VM suffices. Don't really trust RedHat anymore with it if IBM is pushing it's corporate culture down on them.
- InvaderFizz 5y ago
  I'm sure it trims many things down to a general VM baseline, but they can't trim all the different hypervisor hardware support. Unbeknownst to many, you can run AmazonLinux on-prem[0], AWS distributes their image on a public pages (we use this to allow developers to have the same image locally and on the cloud). Additionally, you can export any AMI to a S3 bucket[1] and download that for local use. 0: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-linux-2-virtual-machine.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-l... 1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/vmexport_image.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/vmexp...
  - stewartesmith 5y ago
    For Amazon Linux, the recipes are slightly different for the AMI versus on-Prem. For the AMI we cut out a bunch of things from the initramfs that you don’t typically need in a cloud environment saving a further second (ish) of launch time. This config is in the Dracula-config-ec2 package. For on-Prem you may actually use this, so we don’t build it in there.
broknbottle 5y ago
openSUSE Leap and microOS
spicyusername 5y ago
My home lab is on mostly Fedora CoreOS, with a few Fedora Server. I've been using Fedora for years with good success and these days everything runs in a container, so rpm-ostree and a mostly read-only filesystem simplifies maintenance. If Fedora is too "bleeding edge", but you want to stay in the RHEL ecosystem, you might try CentOS Stream for yourself to decide whether it feels solid enough to rollout, it is the direction Red Hat wants folks to lean toward, though not necessarily the one many are interested in taking.

second--shift 5y ago

I’ve been using Fedora server to good success. My home servers only last about a year or two before i need to tinker & change things. I don’t need 5 yrs of lts support in the OS - 2 yrs of fedora is fine. We use rhel at work & have always paid for the licenses.

Kostic 5y ago

Kubernetes and managed AWS services for production workloads. Fedora Workstation for everything else.

csdvrx 5y ago

Funny, I went the other way with debian and ubuntu as they are close-ish enough to have a similar setup in prod and on my laptop with wsl (and now I'm evaluating PopOS) Your homelab experiences with SBC seems to validate my position. The only use I have for CentOS is to compile Ventoy

tehbeard 5y ago

> (I don't really know what Amazon does under the hood to their Linux distro, but it does show) If it's on AWS hardware I assume they've extremely trimmed down any and all kernel gubbins that isn't related to the hardware they run on? As for our migration plans... Well luckily we're on CentOS 7, so I have a year or so more to figure that one out and see what way the wind blows. Timings good enough to do a hardware refresh at the same time. Kinda worried for Ansible to be completely honest. I've grown to love it for automating a bunch of sysadmin tasks and managing some stuff at work and my own kit, It's been a nice way to spin up dev boxes w/o going down the whole Kube/Container stack when a VM suffices. Don't really trust RedHat anymore with it if IBM is pushing it's corporate culture down on them.

InvaderFizz 5y ago
I'm sure it trims many things down to a general VM baseline, but they can't trim all the different hypervisor hardware support. Unbeknownst to many, you can run AmazonLinux on-prem[0], AWS distributes their image on a public pages (we use this to allow developers to have the same image locally and on the cloud). Additionally, you can export any AMI to a S3 bucket[1] and download that for local use. 0: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-linux-2-virtual-machine.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-l... 1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/vmexport_image.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/vmexp...
- stewartesmith 5y ago
  For Amazon Linux, the recipes are slightly different for the AMI versus on-Prem. For the AMI we cut out a bunch of things from the initramfs that you don’t typically need in a cloud environment saving a further second (ish) of launch time. This config is in the Dracula-config-ec2 package. For on-Prem you may actually use this, so we don’t build it in there.

broknbottle 5y ago

openSUSE Leap and microOS

spicyusername 5y ago

My home lab is on mostly Fedora CoreOS, with a few Fedora Server. I've been using Fedora for years with good success and these days everything runs in a container, so rpm-ostree and a mostly read-only filesystem simplifies maintenance. If Fedora is too "bleeding edge", but you want to stay in the RHEL ecosystem, you might try CentOS Stream for yourself to decide whether it feels solid enough to rollout, it is the direction Red Hat wants folks to lean toward, though not necessarily the one many are interested in taking.