Pretty much. Install, copy configs over, reboot.
Viola. Minus the thousands of servers claim. And of
course no Oracle.
Exactly. As soon as you have to "copy config over", you're in ad-hoc land.
That works for maybe up to 100 servers with three full-time people, but
simply shatters for huge server farms and one single person.
And in an environment which increases by 5-10 servers per week, it would be
next to impossible to concentrate on actually delivering any real work for
customers. It would be a full time job just "copying configs over and
rebooting". That's exactly my point.
Of course, a valid question might pop up: "what if I don't have that many
systems and such issues to worry about?"
The answer is quite simple: one can use the methods and the engineering for
tens of thousands of systems and run just one single system with them, so
the process scales up and down. The same is not true for even partially
manual / interactive work. Sooner or later one will hit the ceiling of
what's possible, even with 30 people.
Note that I am specifically not discussing dektop users. Desktop users have
at most a handful of systems, if that, and don't run production
environments, which is exactly what makes them desktop users.
You may get security/bug fixes to core components like
the kernel, system libraries. If doing an apt or a yum
on a staging proves clean, I don't see how that should
be a problem. On Open Solaris (this is about Open
It's a problem because testing should be exhaustive, automated, and
structured. There needs to be a strict process on how and when stuff is
allowed to be put into production. If you have one person that just goes and
updates systems ad-hoc, that person is burning time and resources updating
systems instead of doing engineering. In practice, people get distracted,
delayed or otherwise short on time. Systems get neglected and soon enough
you have a salad.
Plus, lots of places simply have a policy of "never touch a running system".
The way "apt-get" or "yum update" should be performed is by integrating
those fixes and patches into the next release of the platform, be it your
Flash(TM) archive or whatever distribution medium one picks.
Once the testing process passes in developement, it moves to the |product
testing and acceptance" phase. If it passes that too, it is deemed
production ready.
So the way to do a fix is to integrate it into the next release of the
platform, not do ad-hoc patching. Just look at Sun; they do something very
similar, and for the at least last 25 years, it's worked for both them and a
very large number of their customers.
As for OpenSolaris, the way to update Solaris Express is to upgrade to the
next release, or depending on your environment, do a BFU (Blindingly Fast
Update). Contrary to all the Joyent propaganda, Sun has never claimed this
to be the production depoyment thing to do, and I wholeheartedly agree with
them. Considering the environment where I work, anything even remotely
"developer-like" would get a production signoff when hell freezes over. And
rightly so!
Yes, people do use Fedora in production. It is stable
enough and this is not some mission critical bank system.
One of the "El-Reg" readers recently wrote in response to an article:
"if it's good enough for a bank, it's sure good enough for me!"
And knowing what kind of structured, rigorous, CMMI and Six Sigma based
engineering process these institutions go through, I couldn't agree more
with that reader.
So when I think of running Fedora in "production"... that would never be
production. That would be what we call "break-fix mode", or "putting out
constant fires". But such environments are usually small, with a handful of
white box systems and a few self-taught "computer guys".
I'm sure that at this point someone will find themselves compelled to point
out how organization XYZ runs Fedora on X number of systems... and having
worked as a Linux system engineer before, I have just one thing to say to
that: yes, but how much longer before the whole "break-fix" mode collapses?
We are dealing with simple economies of scale here, after all.
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