

Ask HN: What flavor of Linux do you run in the cloud and why? - brettweaverio

We have been working with Red Hat (yeah, big enterprise), however I'm inclined to advocate for a switch to Amazon's Linux.  Like to hear others perspective.
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jeramey
At my day job, we run CentOS 5 on EC2 instead of Amazon Linux because we
actually run a hybrid local-node/EC2-cluster and it is easier to verify
software builds on a single platform rather than two of them. The distribution
we use actually doesn't matter a whole lot, though, as long as it is
consistent between what we can install locally and what we can install on EC2.
Our choice is actually constrained by what Amazon offers for the node types we
primarily use (cc1.4xlarge).

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intesar
I use CentOS on my personal server's largely because I use Red Hat at work, In
past four years twice my servers were compromised coz I didn't applied
security patches on time. Personally I like Ubuntu and I used it on my laptop
for couple years until I switched to Mac, Installing patches, apps and
upgrades are very simple on Ubuntu compared to CentOS, if you are a new bie I
recommend Ubuntu.

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timClicks
Ubuntu, largely because I came to Linux via Ubuntu and understand its idioms.
Over time, I've noticed that documentation for most open source projects
includes Ubuntu, which helps.

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bmelton
I've got a few servers personally that I run, all are either Debian or Ubuntu.
That's what I run on my laptop and desktop, so it makes it easier for me to
develop locally.

With virtualenv, github, fabric, etc., deploying isn't as much of a challenge
as it used to be, but I like to keep it as straightforward as possible.

For the day job, we use RedHat Enterprise, because our target market is
enterprise, and that's the most widely accepted Enterprise Linux distro in the
enterprise.

I'm not a particularly big fan of RH-based distros, but I vastly prefer RH to
Solaris or Windows, so I count my blessings.

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brettweaverio
Agreed, however I've been feeling for a while that Red Hat is becoming the new
Solaris. Everything takes twice as long and is a couple revs out of date when
compared to other distros.

I've been struggling to find the value in their services to justify this trade
off.

~~~
bmelton
Without getting into a distro debate, the immediate justification for RHEL to
Enterprises is that there's somebody to blame if it doesn't work, and that
there's a vendor to call if their generally mediocre onsite staff can't solve
a problem.

Compared to Solaris, it's cheaper, package management is much easier, and it
has all the Linuxy goodness that corporations _feel_ make them more agile.

