
Ask HN: Does anyone use Fedora Server in production? - roryrjb
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 &quot;equivalent&quot;). 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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lykr0n
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).

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bennetts2
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.

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bayindirh
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.

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gormz
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.

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roryrjb
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..

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derekp7
Fedora is upstream for RHEL. So to have a new RHEL release, they need a Fedora
server release.

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blinkingled
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.

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rufugee
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.

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blinkingled
EOL releases don't get any updates. EOL happens in a year or so approximately.
From
[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade](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.

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txutxu
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.

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

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dsr_
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.

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

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mindcrime
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.

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godot
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.

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mindcrime
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.

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chomp
Arista gear has a Fedora server built into them.

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

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

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roryrjb
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.

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etcet
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.

~~~
majewsky
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.

