Spotify Switches From Debian To Ubuntu

[Ansla]

Why do they need 5000 servers anyway? Netflix streams video, accounting for more than half the Internet traffic in the US at peak times, from only 50 servers or so. FreeBSD, just saying.

Where did you find that figure?

[profoundWHALE]

Where did you find that figure?

Not only has it been reported by ISPs and Netflix itself, but we are talking about traffic, not necessarily unique traffic.

Netflix is high-bandwidth. Lets say 1 in 2 American Households watches Netflix once at peak hours. That's a LOT of traffic.

[profoundWHALE]

Where did you find that figure?

Sorry for the double post, but I was reading some Mozilla stuff and came across this
EDIT: http://www.azcentral.com/story/money...rises/2138874/
So it looks like Netflix alone is not quite 50% now but it is still a significant amount of traffic from one site.

[chrisq]

Another, much simpler explanation is that most people on their staff right now are users/fans of Ubuntu rather than Debian. And despite the reasonings given to management, this was just the personal preference of the majority of their staff? If you look closely at the email on Debian mailing lists it mentions that one Debian developer no longer works at Spotify.

This would explain why they didn't go for RHEL/CentOS either, despite having very long-term supported releases, and systemd already (in RHEL7). Or FreeBSD.

Why do they need 5000 servers anyway? Netflix streams video, accounting for more than half the Internet traffic in the US at peak times, from only 50 servers or so. FreeBSD, just saying.

Even if it is true, those servers hardly do any of traffic, cdn's do.

[GreatEmerald]

I wasn't aware Spotify was already using systemd or any other non-default init on Debian, or are you speaking to the fact that the Debian Project offers no commercial support? As I said, Spotify's 14.04 configuration only matters to the extent they can get support for it; if that's not something they are interested in or is otherwise not a concern of theirs, then their 14.04 setup is of no matter at all.

Both. They were already using systemd, and I am talking about the fact that Debian offers no commercial support.

[stevenc]

Where did you find that figure?

Oh wow my recollection was a little bit off. I was thinking of an article similar to those posted above. The 'video streaming group' dominated by Netflix and Youtube accounts for half the peak North American Internet traffic, with the Netflix part being about 33% of the total traffic.

And Netflix have about 1000 of these (FreeBSD) systems by now (not 50):

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2177071/data-center/how-netflix-streams-movies-to-your-tv.html

But storing and streaming HD movies is obviously a lot more demanding than, just OGG audio streams. So I maintain that Spotify has relatively many servers for what they do.

[ownagefool]

Well, Debian doesn't clearly communicate how they want to go about LTS releases, so this is easy to understand from Spotify's point of view.

I don't really think these type of installs need LTS. Stable is old enough when it comes out, you get about 2-3 years then you get about another year to migrate away. If you're managing your servers properly, you should be able to upgrade something like this in a quater or two. Being able to rebuild your environment should be something easy, the QA and sign off is where you lose the time.

Now if you're running a hosting provider, selling servers as a service or using linux in any number of ways that your installs are very likely to be numerous and unlikely to be uniform, you will probably want those LTS installs.

Still, I do accept that Debian is a bit fuzzy about the release cycle and it'd be nice if they commited to at least minimum dates earlier.

[Teho]

And Netflix have about 1000 of these (FreeBSD) systems by now (not 50):
http://www.networkworld.com/article/...o-your-tv.html

Not only that but they also run 1000 or more Linux machines:

Incredibly, there is no data center behind Netflix. The application is "cloud native", running on 500 to 1,000 Linux-based web machines and distributed across three Amazon service zones, an infrastructure that provides a highly agile and available service, Cockroft said. If something goes wrong, Netflix can continue to run the entire service on two out of three zones -- a scenario it tests often with its open source Chaos Gorilla software.

-Source, 2013

FreeBSD is only used for content delivery network. The web sites & all run on LInux.

[xeekei]

Not only that but they also run 1000 or more Linux machines:

-Source, 2013

FreeBSD is only used for content delivery network. The web sites & all run on LInux.

Right. I'm sure Spotify counted ALL their servers when they said 5000. Still, Spotify uses bittorrent to distribute the load across their users, so I still agree that it's odd that they need that many servers.

[jimbohale]

it's not about breaking promises. it's about quality of delivering. all you need to look is how LTS is approached to.

ubuntu is more or less mashup of the regular current version with longer life time. its basically regular version with slapped "LTS" and "5 year warranty" stickers on it. not to mention ubuntu is not really working on most projects at all beside rebranding

centos/rhel on the other hand take fedora as base, where work just started with intent of having production and stability value which makes centos/rhel defacto best choice when you need LTS. and rh would be one of biggest contributors working actively in FOSS

So all of the Ubuntu servers I run in production and have for between 0-4 years that have been extremely stable and with extremely prompt security fixes aren't stable? I might not like Ubuntu on the desktop that much (although I can respect that it caters to the end-user) but Ubuntu server from an actual person who manages actual servers for an actual company is the most supported distro and it's obvious that they do a really good job at it. If I ran RHEL or CentOS on those machines the updates would be less frequent (obviously neither do major version updates, but *at least* do minor version updates) and wouldn't even automatically install security updates (unless they added something in).