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> Immutable distros are becoming a de-facto standard for server deployments What? No they're not. I literally have never once in my career seen a server deploy

by bigstrat2003 2y ago

> Immutable distros are becoming a de-facto standard for server deployments What? No they're not. I literally have never once in my career seen a server deployed with an immutable distro.

SR2Z 2y ago
That's probably because they are practically most used for the underlying OS of a Kubernetes host (seeing as how it is difficult by definition to configure an immutable install). If you really think about it, what's the difference between spinning up a VM with a preconfigured image and spinning up a VM with an _immutable_ preconfigured image?
- ilbeeper 2y ago
  The difference is that one is immutable and the other is not. One can be rolled back to earlier version while retaining user data and the other doesn't offer that ability.
  - SR2Z 2y ago
    Sure, but the GKE autoscaler will happily erase and recreate machines whenever it wants. Divergences from the base image are inherently limited because of that.
    - ilbeeper 2y ago
      Despite the name, that's not what immutable distros are for. GKE won't let yet restore previous generation of configured and component versioned base image.
ghshephard 2y ago
Plus 1 on this - I've probably had direct responsibility for managing fleets of roughly 50,000 linux hosts - never seen an immutable distro. We usually just burn a fresh image of whatever mainline ubuntu is offering every week or two into the fleet. Saying that containers are becoming a defacto standard is reasonable though - pretty much every company I've worked with and my coworkers have worked with have shifted everything into containers (at least in companies with x00k microservice instances running on ~100k machine environments).
- fsckboy 2y ago
  >I've probably had direct responsibility for managing fleets of roughly 50,000 linux hosts - never seen an immutable distro. plus, given your wealth of experience, I'm more interested in what linux you run on your personal laptop
  - ghshephard 2y ago
    WSL2 + Ubuntu. It's either MacOS or Windows in BigCorp with all the Okta/Crowdstrike/... stuff they require - and I like the apt-get convenience. Most of my time is in Tmux anyways. Over the last 15 years the client side has been one of MacOS, ArchLinux, Ubuntu, and now Windows/WSL2. The real activity has shifted up to the orchestration and service discovery layers - nomad, k8s, consul, and whatever fleetmanagement/cluster management layers maintains the hosts (a lot of homebuilt + terraform + chef/argo-workflow in our world). It's been years since I was really that concerned about the linux host side of things - why care about "immutable" when the entire machine/image is ephemeral for < 1 week (or in some cases, <1 day) anyways?

> Immutable distros are becoming a de-facto standard for server deployments What? No they're not. I literally have never once in my career seen a server deployed with an immutable distro.

SR2Z 2y ago

That's probably because they are practically most used for the underlying OS of a Kubernetes host (seeing as how it is difficult by definition to configure an immutable install). If you really think about it, what's the difference between spinning up a VM with a preconfigured image and spinning up a VM with an _immutable_ preconfigured image?

ilbeeper 2y ago
The difference is that one is immutable and the other is not. One can be rolled back to earlier version while retaining user data and the other doesn't offer that ability.
- SR2Z 2y ago
  Sure, but the GKE autoscaler will happily erase and recreate machines whenever it wants. Divergences from the base image are inherently limited because of that.
  - ilbeeper 2y ago
    Despite the name, that's not what immutable distros are for. GKE won't let yet restore previous generation of configured and component versioned base image.

ghshephard 2y ago

Plus 1 on this - I've probably had direct responsibility for managing fleets of roughly 50,000 linux hosts - never seen an immutable distro. We usually just burn a fresh image of whatever mainline ubuntu is offering every week or two into the fleet. Saying that containers are becoming a defacto standard is reasonable though - pretty much every company I've worked with and my coworkers have worked with have shifted everything into containers (at least in companies with x00k microservice instances running on ~100k machine environments).

fsckboy 2y ago
>I've probably had direct responsibility for managing fleets of roughly 50,000 linux hosts - never seen an immutable distro. plus, given your wealth of experience, I'm more interested in what linux you run on your personal laptop
- ghshephard 2y ago
  WSL2 + Ubuntu. It's either MacOS or Windows in BigCorp with all the Okta/Crowdstrike/... stuff they require - and I like the apt-get convenience. Most of my time is in Tmux anyways. Over the last 15 years the client side has been one of MacOS, ArchLinux, Ubuntu, and now Windows/WSL2. The real activity has shifted up to the orchestration and service discovery layers - nomad, k8s, consul, and whatever fleetmanagement/cluster management layers maintains the hosts (a lot of homebuilt + terraform + chef/argo-workflow in our world). It's been years since I was really that concerned about the linux host side of things - why care about "immutable" when the entire machine/image is ephemeral for < 1 week (or in some cases, <1 day) anyways?