Re: Dreamhost dumps Debian
Excerpts from Kevin Chadwick's message of 2013-08-30 10:28:51 -0700:
> > I wasn't clear, I don't mean you'll do each one as a special snowflake
> > in-place. I mean, 20,000 machines is simply a lot of machines to
> > manage. No matter what, upgrading or replacing the OS all within a 1
> > year schedule that you do not control and cannot fully predict, is a
> > big hassle.
>
> Well Unix caters well to changes of hardware so I disagree completely.
> You can easily workout what data on those 20,000 machines can be done
> once and copied over and sort out the rest. There are even systems like
> puppet that will handle imaging and scripting etc. automatically.
>
"Upgrading is easy" is not really a valid retort. Though it does mitigate
the cost, it does not eliminate it. Nobody wants to spend their automation
budget on making upgrading easy enough to do on a whim. There are plenty
of other concerns that automation must address that have nothing to do
with this problem.
Upgrading every 2 years vs. every 4 with more predictable time lines is
quite obviously less desirable. Lets not forget that there is a bigger
overlap (3 years) between Ubuntu LTS's, so when 14.04 comes out, they
can start the move off 12.04, but they have _three years_ to complete it,
which also means more time to report bugs and get them fixed in Ubuntu,
etc. And if 16.04 comes around and they still have 12.04 kicking around
in some dark corners, they have another year to finish that.
> OTOH reducing staff for 4 years rather than two in a highly competitive
> hosting market to reduce costs may be important but if they are
> installing the way suggested then they are far far from that and
> frankly I wouldn't use them if they are installing like users do for a
> few machines as that doesn't reflect competence and bad practice
> shouldn't affect debian's processes so perhaps some more details are
> required as to why they do things in a way that makes the 5 year cycle
> matter.
Your logic has a pretty big hole in it. Who said they would have to
increase staff to get the upgrade done? They can complete the upgrade
with less staff to begin with now. Also if they did increase staff,
and there was a gap between upgrade periods, my guess is they can make
use of that staff to do other things to reduce costs or increase profits.
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