Re: Dreamhost dumps Debian
Excerpts from Thomas Goirand's message of 2013-08-25 16:36:48 -0700:
> On 08/21/2013 05:45 PM, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
> > Large hosting companies not having made their scripts etc. good enough
> > to ride out upgrades well should have nothing to do with any decision.
>
> I don't think the problem here is with "Large hosting companies not
> having made their scripts etc. good enough". I don't think it has
> anything to do with size, or the type of company, or even the activity.
> I believe that the short life cycles of our stable releases is a problem
> for *MANY* companies. Dreamhost is the tree hiding the forest.
>
> On 08/21/2013 07:08 PM, Clint Byrum wrote:
> > It also doesn't hurt that OpenStack does all commit gating on Ubuntu,
> > thus making Ubuntu the preferred platform (RHEL/CentOS will likely
> > join Ubuntu in the gate someday soon).
>
> We asked Debian to be added. I hope that Debian will be added as a
> non-voting gating one day. I'll try to push for that to happen.
>
I think "doing" will work out better than "asking". The OpenStack
infrastructure team is large, but they are also busy. Let me know if I
can help guide you toward doing any of this work. I'm not on the team
but I work closely with them quite a bit.
> > DreamHost is a player in
> > OpenStack, so it may be that the momentum of Ubuntu plus OpenStack is
> > just too great to ignore with the added pain of the 2 year upgrade
> > treadmill.
> >
> > I will ask them when I visit their offices at the next OpenStack LA
> > meetup. :)
>
> Well, yes. But also OpenStack release cycles are even shorter than
> Debian! Only a year, then the old stable is not supported anymore. It
> doesn't make sense that Dreamhost is complaining about 2 years of
> security support, when they are now in the "upgrade every 6 months"
> OpenStack stuff... If they join me and become supporters of a kind of
> "LTS" for OpenStack, that'd be great, and I would be very supportive of it.
>
It makes perfect sense. Most organizations I have worked for draw a
clear line between "things that make money" and "things that cost money".
Your server OS is almost never a thing that makes you money, so you want
to minimize it as a cost center.
Because of that, an organization will think twice before any
investment. Dreamhost is building a business on top of OpenStack, so
they're happy to contribute to it and keep upgrading along with it. The
investment they put in has a direct correlation to how much they can
pull back out. The OS will have diminishing returns, so they'd like to
reduce that footprint.
It would be almost totally insane to try and build a public cloud with
Essex or Folsom and expect that you can just install it and leave it
alone for 1 year. Think about the advances in Grizzly. We should see some
impressive advances in Havana as well. So building your direct business
based on a dead duck stable release is just not a winning proposal.
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