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I've recently worked in a high profile company where it took them long and painful to move from CentOS 6 to 7 (over a year long effort, IIRC, finished for prod
by p_l 3y ago
I've recently worked in a high profile company where it took them long and painful to move from CentOS 6 to 7 (over a year long effort, IIRC, finished for prod in 2021? but with some crucial corp infra still on 6 in 2022).
In 2022 they had to start a new huge effort do deal with migration off CentOS7, and the problems were so painful it was considered reasonable to build a Linux distro from scratch and remove all traces of distro dependency from the product (SaaS)
- pas 3y agothat sounds really interesting, can you elaborate on the challenges? why was it so important for them to move off CentOS7, and why didn't they move to RHEL or Alma or Rocky or whatever similar?
- p_l 3y agoUS Government woke up to the fact that allowing vendors waivers on requirements for upgrades ends up with nothing ever happening. CentOS7 is EOL'd next year. Additionally, there was fun of FIPS-140 and OpenSSL older than 3.0. Alma and Rocky were considered, but that would still involve (possibly similarly painful) migration as with CentOS 6 -> 7. Have you seen pricing for RHEL? We're talking hundreds thousands of systems. I never seen raw stats, but I would have been totally unsurprised to see them hit million instances across all clouds used, at least occassionally. Decoupling software from distro dependencies was seen as a way to future proof deployment story and avoid situations like we had with CentOS 7, where they really, really would have liked upgrading some stuff for newer APIs, but couldn't due to mess with OS-provided dependencies.
- pas 3y agodecoupling meant something like using "distroless" or static builds (musl?) or simply shipping everything on an alpine/ubuntu/debian/whatever image? (and previously there was no containerization, but now there is)