
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice - gauravkumar552
http://insights.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-14-04-lts-the-cloud-platform-of-choice/
======
rwmj
Red Hat is the largest single contributor to Open Stack[1]

IMHO Ubuntu gets a free ride because every distro _except_ Ubuntu has to set
up an external CI server in order to get their drivers and changes in.

[1]
[http://activity.openstack.org/dash/releases/](http://activity.openstack.org/dash/releases/)

~~~
allenap
The single largest contributor _by the metrics you posted_. There are other
types of contribution, integration and distribution for example, things that
Ubuntu has traditionally focused on instead of raw upstream work.

By head count, Red Hat is 10 times the size of Canonical. This means that
Canonical would not be expected to show in the graphs you linked to, given the
same level of activity averaged per employee. Yet Ubuntu is the distro of
choice for OpenStack. That speaks to the strength of the community around
OpenStack on Ubuntu, the skill and commitment of the people working on it, and
the quality of the experience.

As to the grumble about spinning up an external CI server: you'll be glad to
know that Ubuntu is really easy to spin up on bare metal or in VMs, and you
don't have to buy licenses ;)

Disclaimer: I work for Canonical, so I am totally biased. I don't work on
OpenStack, but I know many of those who do.

~~~
tsuraan
What do you mean when you say Ubuntu is the distro of choice? Looking at
openstack's install docs, they list install guides for Debian, SUSEs, Red
Hats, and then Ubuntu (in that order). Is there some place on the openstack
site that indicates a preference toward Ubuntu?

~~~
allenap
I may have overstated then.

From rwmj's comment that "every distro except Ubuntu has to set up an external
CI server in order to get their drivers and changes in" I gathered that Ubuntu
was the distro of choice for CI, so that's what I should have written: for
_CI_. I didn't mean to say that Ubuntu is the OpenStack project's preferred
choice for deployment.

------
Paul_S
We use virtual servers and all of them run different releases of ubuntu and
for the life of me I don't understand why they're not running debian. You
never start an X session on a server and what admin would want to use Unity
anyway so what's the point in using Ubuntu rather than stable debian?

~~~
harel
Surely you do not install X on a server.... I don't get your comment

~~~
Paul_S
Aren't those the big selling points of Ubuntu - graphics drivers and unity?
Both of which as you say are irrelevant on a server, I agree.

~~~
jebblue
On the desktop you bet, it beats Windows for me. On the server, check the
other comments, LTS and the ability to run newer stuff but still be very
stable. I really don't see why you're having an issue, Ubuntu Server is plain
and works well.

------
bananas
Really don't know what to do about 14.04 landing. I maintain a few systems
which are in devops territory on top of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, a single desktop
machine and a laptop. 12.04 is EOL in 2017 and we plan to replace them next
year (we operate a 3 year standard cycle).

With the other major distributions moving towards systemd and eventually
wayland (that includes the base of Ubuntu: Debian), I'm not sure I really want
to move onto 14.04 and continue this cycle further and risk it on Mir,
Upstart, Unity and various other Canonical worldview items.

I'm considering ignoring this release and moving to CentOS 7 when it hits the
ground.

~~~
rlpb
Ubuntu is also now moving to systemd, following its Debian base:
[http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316)

Assuming that you're not a toolkit (or further down the stack) developer, can
you explain why Mir affects you?

What other "Canonical worldview items" affect you?

~~~
bananas
As follows:

systemd - glad to hear that. Missed that one.

Mir affects me because of the inevitable _safety in numbers_ that going with
the majority display server technology. Graphical stacks are terribly
complicated and terribly involving for hardware manufacturers. Canonical are
pretty much on their own with it and it takes a hell of a lot of people to
keep the plates spinning on this. hell they can't even get X, DRM, GLX etc
stable after all these years and thousands of eyes.

Other canonical worldview items:

Unity. Sorry but this doesn't actually work properly. Various applications
have focus problems still after years of it, it's unstable, inconsistent,
breaks apps (menus for example) and has incredible usability problems. I know
you can use gnome but it's not a priority support item for Canonical so
various things don't work consistently.

Launchpad. Launchpad is a total pile both from a tracking and management
perspective. It's basically a baron land of neglect.

Probably more that I've forgotten.

~~~
rlpb
You're claiming "safety in numbers" by moving _away_ from Ubuntu on the
desktop? Surely you're joking?

> Unity

So don't use it. Ubuntu is more than just priority support items from
Canonical. I'm using Xubuntu right now - it works great.

> Launchpad is a total pile both from a tracking and management perspective.
> It's basically a baron land of neglect.

As opposed to...Bugzilla? Again: surely you're joking?

~~~
bananas
Yes 100%.

I want stability. In fact I need stability and there's nothing more stable
than a boring corporate desktop so...

CentOS 6.x's Gnome desktop despite being considerably older is an order of
magnitude more stable, works flawlessly on every bit of kit I've tested it on
and doesn't fall over on minor patches or kernel releases. I lost count of the
number of times I've had power management and display regressions on 12.04
LTS. The only reason I ended up with LTS is because the NetworkManager VPN
stuff that I need on my laptop is tied into later versions of NetworkManager
which aren't supported on CentOS at the moment. I will say that they don't
actually work on 14.04 either and I have to resort to manually adding a route
because NM doesn't handle default routes properly.

On my personal laptop (Lenovo T400) I binned Ubuntu and actually run Windows
now because the PM regressions were unbearable and the battery life was shitty
even with 30 minutes pissing around with powertop.

Yes comparing to bugzilla. People haven't managed to displace bugzilla for a
good reason: it works pretty damn well on massive projects.

~~~
kbenson
I think what you are seeing is the ancestry of these projects coming to the
fore. Ubuntu is, to my eyes, first and foremost a desktop OS that is trying to
make inroads into the server OS space (replace OS with distro if if helps
helps lower your pedanti-meter). RHEL/CentOS have always been very
server/workstation based (and I do consider a workstation different than a
desktop).

You can see this in how they focus their work. Ubuntu, while it's contributed
much to the ecosystem, has focused quite a bit of those contributions to ease
of use and graphical stack items. These are important, but less so to
workstations (of a particular breed) and servers. Red Hat has focused on
stability and management. Need a full virtualization stack? RHEL has developed
a stack they are pushing as competition for VMWare. Want directory services?
It's an officially supported component with documentation (as of at least 4-5
years ago). Want a bug tracker with lots of info on exactly what's going on
and what to expect? Use Bugzilla. It's overkill for most user-facing projects,
but for IT staff who may be expected to file a fair number of bugs over time,
after you've invested some time to learn it, it's great.

Ubuntu is a great OS/distro, but I don't think they've reached the same level
in the server space as RHEL yet. Similarly, I wouldn't necessarily push
RHEL/CentOS for desktops for home users or most businesses needing Linux on
the desktop, unless there was a need for a much more controlled environment,
and the long time between versions is not an issue.

------
tdicola
I installed the 14.04 LTS beta on a laptop to kick the tires last week.
Overall it seems really nice. I was happy to see GCC 4.8 is the default
compiler.

The only major glitch I had was hitting this bug where external debs (like
Chrome, Dropbox, etc.) won't install in software center:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-
center/+b...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/software-
center/+bug/1290228) Luckily they just fixed it, so the official release
shouldn't have issues.

------
mindcrime
Whose choice? Not mine... not that I have anything in particular _against_
Ubuntu (in fact, I'm on an Ubuntu system as I write this, because it's our
corporate standard desktop here), but I still prefer Red Hat based distros,
whether it's RHEL, CentOS, Fedora or what-have-you?

"Why?" you might ask. Well, TBH, a lot of it is just familiarity - I've been
using RH based distros since the Red Hat 5.2 days, so it's what I know
already. But more to the point, it just works. I haven't felt any pain using
Fedora, CentOS and their ilk, that has ever compelled me to go looking for a
different solution. And that's even more true for servers, where I don't care
about prepackaged video codecs or sound or anything.

The one big thing that everyone has always touted as the edge that
Debian/Ubuntu have over RH systems, is apt. But after having used Ubuntu for 2
years now, I still haven't found any regard in which is apt is particularly
better than yum. Yeah, yum _used to be_ dog slow, but that hasn't been a
problem in ages. And I don't know about you, but it still annoys me that I
need one command, yum, to both search for packages and install them on
CentOS/RHEL/Fedora, but I need apt-cache and apt-get to do the same thing on
Ubuntu.

Anyway, props to the Ubuntu folks for the release. I do lean towards Red Hat
derived distros, but I won't say that Ubuntu is _bad_ or anything.

~~~
jcastro
> but I need apt-cache and apt-get to do the same thing on Ubuntu.

apt 1.0 in Ubuntu now contains an `apt` binary, which means this is finally
fixed! See also:
[http://mvogt.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/apt-1-0/](http://mvogt.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/apt-1-0/)

~~~
mindcrime
Aah, well that's handy to know. It's always bugged me a bit, even though it's
admittedly a minor nit.

------
mwcampbell
I suppose it was a good PR move, but I wish Ubuntu hadn't added Docker to an
official repository (albeit the universe one) yet, since Docker hasn't hit
1.0. Especially since Ubuntu is packaging it under the name "docker.io",
whereas the official package is called "lxc-docker". Seems bound do generate
confusion.

~~~
mrsteveman1
They can fix the name issue with a meta package, I've seen that happen a few
times.

Personally I'd rather they just leave a lot of this stuff to PPAs and external
repos.

~~~
mwcampbell
I'm ambivalent about distro package repos versus official packages or PPAs. On
the one hand, having all the packages one needs in one place can be quite
convenient. On the other hand, Debian (and by extension Ubuntu) has rather
strong views about how the whole system should fit together, which it imposes
on its packages. So the way a piece of software is packaged in Debian and
Ubuntu can be quite different from what the upstream developers intended. I'm
reminded of this blog post that a Riak developer wrote last year:

[http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/z_packagers-
dont-...](http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/z_packagers-dont-know-
best/)

and its follow-up:

[http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/zz_packaging-
and-...](http://vagabond.github.io/rants/2013/06/21/zz_packaging-and-the-tide-
of-history/)

The Docker package in Ubuntu trusty (which comes from Debian testing/unstable)
is certainly more Debianized than the official package provided by the Docker
team. Whereas the official Docker binary is statically linked (and the build
process has to go through some contortions to make this work), the
Debian/Ubuntu build is dynamically linked. Consequently, the Debian/Ubuntu
build has to run a separate "dockerinit" binary inside containers, whereas the
official build uses a single binary on both sides. Naturally the official
build is tested much more extensively, so I'd recommend using that.

------
RivieraKid
Does anyone have an experience with OpenStack? How much worse is it than AWS?

~~~
viraptor
It's not worse, it's not better. It's got very different approach to many
things. It also depends who deploys it and with which features/services
enabled. Rackspace is different than HP cloud is different than ...

In comparison to AWS: The best thing in OS for me is the very flexible network
configuration where you can define exactly what your environment looks like.
The worst is lack of customised authorization / access control. Unless you
need any specific part of AWS integrated into your environment, OS should give
you most of the things you need. You can also mix&match services (just watch
out where the internal data rates no longer apply).

~~~
RivieraKid
Thanks (you and other commenters). I had a closer look at OpenStack and it
looks way better than I've thought.

------
D9u
Ubuntu still _phones home_ too much for my liking.

That said, I appreciate how much the OS has improved since I first gave
"Breezy Badger" a spin a few years ago, and Ubuntu is the obvious choice when
I recommend an alternative OS to my non-tech savvy acquaintances.

------
pnathan
Very marketing-buzzword heavy.

~~~
mwcampbell
I found the buzzword-laden marketing-speak quite annoying, but we (hackers)
are probably not the intended audience. This is probably written for a non-
technical decision maker who wouldn't understand anything written at a much
lower level of abstraction.

~~~
wglb
So if I had seen this article, I probably would not have posted it to HN.

------
chronid
I really hope we get a contender for the linux servers space. Maybe it will be
Canonical, maybe not, but having Red Hat/CentOS everywhere (in new deployments
at least) is starting to tire me.

~~~
pedrocr
Isn't Ubuntu already dominant in cloud deployments?

~~~
bsilvereagle
In personal and small projects, yes. But not necessarily for large, scaled,
infrastructure.

~~~
dharma1
not sure which distro is dominant on scaled projects but Ubuntu gets plenty of
use on large projects too - from the article:

"Global enterprises including AT&T, Bharti, Bouygues Telecom, British Telecom,
China Telecom, China Unicom, Cogent Communications, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom,
Korea Telecom, NEC, NTT, Numergy, Orange France, Time Warner Cable, Turk
Telecom, Verizon and Yandex, as well as leading web scale services such as
Netflix, Instagram, Hipchat and Quora are all building next generation
services on Ubuntu"

~~~
sixbrx
"Article" is one word for it, a more specific phrase would be "press release".

It's hard to tell from these lists how seriously a lot of those companies are
relying on Ubuntu. Obviously some are (HP for example). But I've seen my own
employers listed in press releases where us implementors were wondering "do we
really still use that stuff? Oh yeah I think there may be a box or two still
running that from when we were testing the waters."

------
wtbob
I'm happy for them, I really am, but I think that it's a real shame that we
don't see this level of support for Debian.

------
duaneb
Ubuntu is far too opinionated to be a stable "cloud platform".

~~~
kapilvt
yeah.. we should all use a distro based on something unopinionated.. like
systemd ;-)

personally i'd rather benefit from solid pkg management with updates and bits
available for free (as opposed to only paid subscriptions) and with wide
availability of the same cloud images across cloud platforms (published by the
distro themselves).

sometimes opinions are good and beneficial, and become widely adopted because
its just a better way of doing things ergo, ubuntu cloudinit for declarative
userdata based initialization of cloud instances, has promulgated far and wide
across other distros and operating systems.

~~~
Crito
How about a distro that moves carefully, making an effort to not use their
users as test subjects?

I've switched to Debian Stable for all of my stuff. Life is too short to be
beta-testing for Fedora/Ubuntu for free. RHEL/Centos/Scientific is another
reasonable choice.

------
dan15
So what does Ubuntu do that Debian doesn't?

~~~
leaveyou
I know my reply will sound a bit provocative but I'm genuinely interested, so
I dare to ask, what does Debian do that Ubuntu doesn't ?

~~~
bronson
Be the upstream project.

------
forgotAgain
Until now I agreed and have used Ubuntu for several years. I was however taken
by surprise by how out of the mainstream Ubuntu seemed to security folks when
Heartbleed was being identified and it's fix promulgated.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7592244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7592244)

It left me wondering if Redhat's contributions to the security community give
it a leg up. Any "cloud platform of choice" needs to be a first tier security
platform. The Heartbleed bug shows that it may not be.

~~~
agwa
That timeline shows that Red Hat knew about Heartbleed exactly 14 minutes
before the other distros did. Hardly sounds like a "leg up" to me.

The Heartbleed disclosure was kind of botched, but in general things go more
smoothly, with all the major distros being informed ahead of time and having
time to prepare patches. For example, see the Xen privilege escalation
vulnerability in 2012, and the PostgreSQL remote execution vulnerability in
2013. In both cases, Ubuntu was informed ahead of time and had updates ready
to roll when the vulnerability was publicly disclosed.

~~~
forgotAgain
Several of the OpenSSL contributors are RedHat employees. I would presume that
Redhat learned of the problem when OpenSSL learned of the problem.

