CentOS - Jan 2021 - CentOS Stream suitability as a production webserver

I'll be the first to admit I don't like change and arguably I'm in
the wrong industry for that, but that's another matter. However I don't
want to throw away years of experience with CentOS/Fedora and time invested
(mine personally and my company's) learning and perfecting setups of which I
have now around 50. A fair few of my Ansible setup are EL only, both from Galaxy
and custom. I'm used to the layout, the packages, and what you'd expect
after ~10 years of working with it.

At the moment my question possibly would have been better phrased "Why
isn't Streama suitable platform for a production web server".

I get that everyone including myself is frustrated by the situation and so
I'm trying to filter out the doomsayers and those who want to annoy RH by
saying they are jumping to another distro like Debian. To me, I'm thinking
at least for my situation and has already been said, Stream might actually be a
positive but I shall wait and see what happens. And as for the 5 years LTS, that
will be the same for every distro anyway.

Cheers
Jamie
> On 6 Jan 2021, at 17:56, Mauricio Tavares <raubvogel at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 
> ?On Wed, Jan 6, 2021 at 8:30 AM Jamie Burchell <mail at
jamieburchell.com> wrote:
>> 
>> We use Ansible "to a point" in that it sets up what we
consider to be our preferred server (Droplet) for a specific purpose, then we
deploy projects on them and tweak non-Ansible managed project configs. It's
not old-school scripts and it's not quite a one-liner to deploy everything.
It's somewhere in the middle. So in reality, providing we have control over
a customer's DNS or we use floating IPs, migrating to another major release
isn't as time consuming as doing everything from scratch.
>> 
>      Good to hear. I myself have been using ansible to deploy basic
> systems -- DNS, mail, my hardware test environment -- so I can then do
> the clever -- decide how I want to run my experiments for instance --
> stuff. Without going over my opinions -- I am very opinionated --
> about the centos thingie, I think you having your playbooks will allow
> you to wait and see how this unfolds. If it goes horribly wrong you
> can still switch.
> 
> With that said, I think your real concern is you can't afford centos
> stream going boink on you. Your customers may not be as understanding
> as Darth Vader if that happens.
> 
> Here is my opinion: Redhat said you have normal centos 8 until the end
> of the year. I would stick to it until, say, October, while keeping an
> eye on how centos stream unfolds. Maybe even running a test centos
> stream to replicate production (or have it in production where it is
> ok if it goes boink). If by then your confidence on stream is high,
> switch to it (*should* be easy). If not, plan to move your customers.
> In the meantime, slowly ensure your ansible playbooks can handle the
> other usual suspects (at least debian and one of the other RH-derived
> distros). And plan the order you will move your customers if you have
> to.
> 
>>>> On 6 Jan 2021, at 13:17, Mauricio Tavares <raubvogel at
gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> ?On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 6:32 PM Jamie Burchell <mail at
jamieburchell.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Off topic for sure, but it's a shame this has to be a
manual process of
>>>> destroying and rebuilding every X years. Even Microsoft has
gone the Apple
>>>> way and just perpetually updates Windows 10 now.
>>>> 
>>>     Do you use tools like ansible/chef? If you can put the time in,
>>> you can make your webservers rather distro agnostic. I would even
put
>>> terraform on the table. It is not like your customers will know the
>>> difference.
>>> 
>>>>> On Tue, 5 Jan 2021 at 23:20, Gordon Messmer
<gordon.messmer at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 1/5/21 3:02 PM, Jamie Burchell wrote:
>>>>>> We will need to (manually) migrate to Stream 9.x after
5 years instead of
>>>>>> 10 though?
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Yes.  CentOS Stream has a lifecycle comparable with other
LTS
>>>>> distributions.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> CentOS mailing list
>>>>> CentOS at centos.org
>>>>> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>>>>> 
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On Wed, Jan 6, 2021, 2:44 PM Jamie Burchell <mail at jamieburchell.com>
wrote:
> I'll be the first to admit I don't like change and arguably I'm
in the
> wrong industry for that, but that's another matter. However I don't
want to
> throw away years of experience with CentOS/Fedora and time invested (mine
> personally and my company's) learning and perfecting setups of which I
have
> now around 50. A fair few of my Ansible setup are EL only, both from Galaxy
> and custom. I'm used to the layout, the packages, and what you'd
expect
> after ~10 years of working with it.
>
> At the moment my question possibly would have been better phrased "Why
> isn't Streama suitable platform for a production web server".
>
> I get that everyone including myself is frustrated by the situation and so
> I'm trying to filter out the doomsayers and those who want to annoy RH
by
> saying they are jumping to another distro like Debian. To me, I'm
thinking
> at least for my situation and has already been said, Stream might actually
> be a positive but I shall wait and see what happens. And as for the 5 years
> LTS, that will be the same for every distro anyway.
>
> Cheers
> Jamie
>
>
Or you could move today to Springdale linux or Oracle or one of the new
RHEL clones that will still be based on  RHEL and have the same 10 year
release cycle. Springdale and Oracle are options today and there are a
couple more that are supposedly going to come online 1st or 2nd quarter,
there are options.

>At the moment my question possibly would have been better phrased "Why
>isn't Streama suitable platform for a production web server".
It is , but expect rough edges.
The differences will be :
- Shorter lifetime .If you skip the first 2 minor releases -it will be shorter
- No chance to "yum history undo last" as there are no older packages
. You have to use Boom boot manager to rollback OS updates
- More testing is needed as the chance that someone broke something is bigger

Best Regards,
Strahil Nikolov