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I'm not particularly fond of how OpenShift is put together, but it does seem like you're overreacting somewhat.

CoreOS is pretty well aligned with Fedora, so it makes sense for it to go there organizationally. And while it's inevitable that everything in Red Hat's orbit will have a clear path to OpenShift (and probably Ansible), I'm hopeful that this won't add any noticable overhead to CoreOS/CL itself.

I took a look at the coreos fedora project[0] as listed by you and others, but it looks immensely experimental right now. From the FAQ[1]:

> Fedora CoreOS is under active development and there are currently no downloads available. However, you will be able to download the images from one canonical location via the CoreOS and Fedora websites. The discussions around this development will happen on our community channels.

I actually really like Ansible -- it plays well with other tools, scales from small to large infrastructure management needs, and has great documentation with enough escape hatches to make hacky (but functional) solutions possible. I have less of a problem with ansible and more being forced to move more and more into tools that push me towards OpenShift when it doesn't make sense for me.

[0]: https://coreos.fedoraproject.org

[1]: https://coreos.fedoraproject.org/faq

Yea, I'll 2nd that. Ansible is immensely pragmatic and capable. Been very happy with it.

It's slow and hard to debug :( (at least in my experience - setting up OpenStack with it)

I used to prefer Chef, but then with CoreOS the dream started to come true, just pack up everything in a container, and 12-factor configure it and that's it, and now I just can't wait for k8s to eat the world, and we'll be back full circle with helm instead of yum/apt.

Not ad-hominem but what do you know how to do? Package other peoples stuff in a config + install and then run scans against it?

I don't get what you mean, could you please elaborate a bit?

Red Hat uses Ansible to set up the Kubernetes/OpenShift cluster itself.

Fedora: Only if you really like breakage and have staff to deal with integration.

Happily running OpenShift Origin on top of CentOS.

> What does everyone else use for their server distros? Is debian the way to go? Ubuntu seems bloated but maybe I just don't know enough about the fat that is cut out of Ubuntu Server? CentOS and Fedora are stable but they seem like they update too slowly, is my assumption wrong?

CentOS/RHEL stability is exactly the reason why I use it. Red Hat spends a lot of money on quality assurance, and it shows. It's a very different experience than Ubuntu, which has a lot more breakage.

The Kubernetes/OpenShift packaging is mostly independent of the host operating system. My applications inside the containers mostly run on Fedora, CentOS + Software Collections and even bleeding-edge Ubuntu, but I'm happy to run a stable OS underneath.

CentOS/RHEL 7 moves a lot faster than previous releases, too. They even rebased OpenSSL for 7.4 to get HTTP/2 support, all while maintaining ABI compatibility.

Fedora is - by design - a lot less stable than CentOS/RHEL - it's the fast-moving upstream project.

Chris from Kinvolk here.

Flatcar Linux is generally available and we are committed to keeping it as a drop-in replacement for Container Linux for the long-term. We were excited about the idea of CoreOS when it was announced in 2013 and think it's a project worthy of sustaining.

Happy to answer questions about it.

Thanks for mentioning this, it looks cool.

Link, for those curious: https://www.flatcar-linux.org/

I think many are using Alpine linux [1]. It's very light weight and seem to be well suited for the task.

[1] https://www.alpinelinux.org/

does Alpine Linux provide Transactional Updates?

Try NixOS for something that has something close to transactional updates.

Wow it looks pretty neat. NixOps looks also really cool, you can deploy in VirtualBox and to the cloud. Reminds me of the old Hashicorp Otto.

Using dockerTools in Nix means you get distroless images!

The 'virtual' version is a mere 32MB. Neat.

Alpine is well known as the OS for containers[0]. BTW the guy pictured is Natanael Copa, the creator of Alpine Linux.

It's a fantastic distribution, and it's a pleasure to use.

[0]: https://thenewstack.io/alpine-linux-heart-docker/

I use CentOS, it updates about a month after redhat doses for the OS and a bit more frequently for most packages in my experience. It's also what >80% of my company uses for there server infrastructure.

I happily use Ubuntu on a few thousand servers running 10s of thousands of containers. We're a polyglot shop with lots of java and lots of go/node and my comfort level with ubuntu is high.

I am also a big fan of Ubuntu Server and Mark Shuttleworth. The guy does not get the proper credit. He's basically running a charity for hackers and startups yet, for some reason, is not very popular on HN.

He's a risk taker with Unity/Ubuntu Phone/other things that didn't pan out, and people treat it like Google abandoning their products. Canonical has money, but not Google money.

People also get overly bent out of shape for having Amazon search integration with the desktop at one point, which I did not like, but it had a clear, functional way to disable that function.

At least, those are my theories.

Their revenue of ~$126M in 2017 is very modest compared with its rivals Red Hat (~$3B) or Microsoft (~$90B). My biggest fear is that one of them may take over Canonical and shut down Ubuntu.

Thanks so much for sharing -- I think I'm going to give Ubuntu Server a try -- Canonical has done so much for open source (as noted by the other comment) and a bunch of innovation lately -- LXD is something I've actually wanted to play with as well as a virtualization option, which I actually failed to set up on Container Linux[0]. I swear I'm not trying to blog-spam, I just legitimately have been dealing with this stuff lately and have been effectively swimming upstream by not using Ubuntu -- looks like I need to stop.

I was mainly worried I'd be spending time downloading noveau/radeon drivers and associated packages on a server with no attached GPUs. I've been leaning towards languages that compile fat binaries (and running with docker regardless), so this is why I'm a little wary of Ubuntu bringing too much to the table. Also, it's been a long time since I ran Ubuntu on a personal machine, I am still a little worried about the risky the dist-upgrade process can be.

Basically all I feel I need is ufw, docker, ssh and was worried that Ubuntu brings too much along for the ride.

[0]: https://vadosware.io/post/trying-and-failing-to-get-lxd-runn...

Server is based on a very minimal seed. There are no graphics drivers or anything X or desktop related. The seed is ultimately very close to what a cloud instance of Ubuntu will include if you want to give it a spin.

There's also openSUSE Kubic. https://kubic.opensuse.org

That is a cool project:

* Transactional updates. No interference with the deployments. You can rollback to any previous state.

* Smart separation of /, /etc and /var, using volumes and overlays properly.

* Using RPMs! I can tailor my installation with traditional RPMs, and the result will be updated at once.

* Zero maintenance. This is kind of magic for me, you create the initial deploy and the system upgrade itself, and rollback if a problem is detected. I wonder how well this works IRL

On the downside is still a bit new, but I found more information here [1]

[1] https://kubic.opensuse.org/blog/2018-07-09-kubicatosc18/

I don't read that as openshift being the replacement. I read that as openshift being the first target of integration efforts, with the replacement coming afterwards.

If you're on coreos, probably just wait till early next year to see what the new OS will be like, then make a decision.

OpenShift is really garbage. Everything red hat adds just makes it worse, and it's a lot slower. The installer is absurdly slow also.

I am worried that I'm shitting on it without using it, but every time I even take a look at the documentation, I just can't stomach it. There's so much happening, all over the place, and it all looks like it was created to be composable, but it seems very non-optional (as in you need to learn 4 OpenShift things before you can do the thing you wanted to do).

Maybe there's someone out there that loves working with it and feels like it's worth the effort but I haven't seen many posts from them. Makes me feel like they're all stuck in corporate dungeons toiling away using stuff they were forced to use.

IMO OpenShift is RedHat's attempt to embrace extend and extinguish vanilla Kubernetes because it threatens their Enterprise OS domination. The host OS for Kubernetes clusters is mostly irrelevant.

It's like Kubernetes... forked from it, but adds all this other shit while they continue to just say it is Kubernetes under the hood. Technically true, but once you go to the OpenShift you're pretty much locked into RedHat's Kubernetesesque-world.

OpenShift predates Kubernetes by a bit, and IMO they operate at different levels (OpenShift is "deeper" and overlaps in some spots with Kubernetes). Also, I'm just about 100% sure no one is stupid/brave enough to challenge Kubernetes' current dominance in the container orchestration space right now. Kubernetes is complete enough and not-bad enough to be the defacto choice right now, and I doubt much will change -- plus Google is backing it, along with the CNCF, there are so many companies with a (in)vested interest.

I do think Red Hat replicates features that Kubernetes does well and trying to do those things well but they operate at different levels fundamentally -- Openshift is like a bunch of individual components that work together (usually at a lower level than Kubernetes does) and Kubernetes is like one coherent platform that smoothes over all the lower-level stuff (CRI, CSI, C*I)...

OpenShift is Kubernetes. A few years ago, they realized that Kubernetes is the future and rebuilt their product on top of it.

OpenShift was re-written to be based on Kubernetes as of version 3 in 2014: https://blog.openshift.com/openshift-v3-platform-combines-do...

I am currently moving all of my infrastructure to OpenShift and I love it - and I chose it after carefully evaluating the alternatives.

It's Kubernetes plus a PaaS platform that takes care of the annoying parts - deploying a cluster (using Ansible), container builds, triggers, deployments, a nice UI... Couldn't be happier.

Red Hat is a major Kubernetes contributor and OpenShift is barely lagging behind upstream k8s. It feels very polished and the documentation - while a bit overwhelming at times - is extremely helpful and extensive. Instead of forking Kubernetes, they only ever add new functionality while simultaneously upstreaming it. For example, the Kubernetes RBAC mechanism was contributed by Red Hat.