[wellylug] Enterprise Linux

[Neil Ramsay]

Hi Jethro,

Thanks for your responses, they are quite helpful.

On 2013-12-21 13:24, Jethro Carr wrote:
> It's also worth looking at your underlying platform. If you're running
> an old school traditional environment (physical or VMware) with manual
> configuration management, I'd go with RHEL/CentOS/Clone since it means
> security patching till the publicly known EOL date for the platform.

We are running a mix of physical, VMWare, and Amazon Cloud. I am not
looking for a one-fits-all Linux, but a group of a Linicies. Amazon 
Linux
makes sense for AWS, and then for hardware and VMWare RHEL makes sense.
Some of our clients don't want to pay for RHEL, so a 'cost-effective'
alternative is desired. I am tending towards CentOS, but still need to
work through the pros/cons.

> However in a new-age of cloud providers, such as Amazon AWS when you
> have ephemeral servers defined by configuration management systems like
> Puppet/Chef/Salt, this consistency is less important.

This is something I would like to do in the future, but I want to start 
to
standardise our Linux environments first.

> I'd make the argument that it's easier to handle a small OS jump every 
> 6
> months and refactor their config management slightly each time to 
> handle
> any changes, than it is to do a major upgrade every 5 years.

I would tend to agree with your argument. Convincing business to 
maintain
a six monthly maintenance schedule is a whole different battle, which
comes later.

Cheers,
Neil