Ask HN: Does anyone use Fedora Server in production? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone use Fedora Server in production?

12 pointsroryrjb24 comments

The general impression I get is that Fedora is really only used on desktop and RHEL or CentOS is used on the server (in terms of the "equivalent"). Where Ubuntu for example is effectively the same distro on desktop as it is on server. So my question is, does anyone actually use Fedora on servers in a production environment? Or is it too bleeding edge?

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Yes. We have a custom build application that requires newer libs that CentOS 7 naively provides as well as some kernel hooks not found in the 3.x kernel.

I've not encountered any problems so far, but we do fairly aggressive full stack testing before we deploy OS updates. Linux has gotten a lot more stable across the board, with Fedora being no exception. I wouldn't recommend running it in production it in a way where you couldn't just destroy the VM and rebuild (like a database server).

Yes, have been doing so since about Fedora 10, with about 30 VMs used for various purposes (i.e. it's not just a cluster of 30 identical systems).

Version upgrades in the early days weren't great, but recently (last 5 years or so) it's been totally fine.

Prior to that I used to do LTS-style distros, with version upgrades every 2 or 3 years, but I've found that testing the impact of an upgrade is far easier if you're doing incremental changes every 6-12 months.

I didn't see any Fedora "production" servers in my system administration life. Since Fedora is a kind of test bed for RedHat development, it is not considered for serious/production servers.

Also, since CentOS is a well established free alternative to RHEL, the unwritten rules point to CentOS for RedHat based servers.

I couldn't see why someone would use Fedora on a server just like no one would use a non LTS Ubuntu for a server.

I see where you are coming from, but what is the point of creating Fedora Server releases and non-LTS Ubuntu Server releases? A minority use them sure but still..

Pissing off the IT guys I guess

Fedora is upstream for RHEL. So to have a new RHEL release, they need a Fedora server release.

It becomes a matter of support. Fedora releases are unsupported in about a year give or take. Which means you have to upgrade to the next one if you need security patches. That's only bad if the next release is unstable for your usecase or breaks something you rely on - s/w versions etc.

Are you saying that Fedora gets no security updates for a year after release? That seems not true, as far as some googling will show. The fixes may be unsupported by a company, but they're still fixes.

EOL releases don't get any updates. EOL happens in a year or so approximately. From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade : Note that Fedora strongly recommends against ever running an end-of-life release on any production system, or any system connected to the public internet, in any circumstances. You should never allow a production Fedora deployment to reach end-of-life in the first place.

It all depends.

If you:

1. Need features on the bleeding edge AND

2. Are capable of fixing or working around any problems that come up AND

3. Are willing to do so in terms of time and effort AND

4. Have made a good business case that the benefits are worth the costs and risks

then, sure, go ahead, use Fedora on your servers. Same as anything else: make a carefully considered decision.

Have seen many customers, and only did see it at laboratories inside university environments.

You're right, most rpm based companies go with centos or rhel.

SUSE is quite popular as well, at least here in Europe.

A small handful, yes. We typically use CentOS for servers, but I know I spun up a couple of Linode instances using Fedora for one reason or another. Now that you mention it, I should probably look at killing those and move them to CentOS as well...

Now on desktop, that's a different story. Fedora is pretty much all I use there.

Just curious, slightly off topic -- for desktop what do you find to be valuable to use Fedora over say CentOS?

I know CentOS is traditionally for servers, but I've played with installing CentOS7 on a laptop for fun and side project work and it's worked out pretty well for me -- but it's also not my full time machine so I don't know if I'm just missing something.

Normally the software in the repos with centos is a lot older. So you can't use the latest Dev tools for example without compiling and installing yourself.

CentOS probably actually works fine on desktop, I use Fedora out of habit as much as anything. If there's a technical reason, it's mostly just about having the "latest and greatest" in terms of drivers, desktop environments, dev tools, etc.

i generally dont like this mentality personally. use whatever youre comfortable with! i personally use arch linux on my servers

Same here! Mostly because I hate having to deal with different tools (or different versions of tools) on my notebook/desktop vs. my servers.

Yes agree exactly. This is why I've tended to stick with Ubuntu on the desktop due to using Ubuntu based servers, but I really like Fedora and it works great on my laptop, but RHEL-based distros are different enough (older kernels, yum vs dnf, etc) to make me avoid running it full time.

Fedora really is a great workstation distro. The best part about using it is that you get to learn the tools you'll be using on your own and your employers CentOS/RHEL servers in a couple of years. We're about due for CentOS 8 and you'll probably feel a lot more comfortable with it as a recent Fedora user.

A huge contributor to my being comfortable with all server distros (RHEL, SLES, Debian, Ubuntu) is actually systemd. It has its issues, but its UI is pretty consistent. Log files for all applications are in one place, enabling/disabling/masking services works the same on all distros, and so on.

Yes, we're using Fedora Server in production, since for some uses we really want a modern userspace and kernel 4.15+.

Arista gear has a Fedora server built into them.

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