LinkedIn Migrates Their Servers From CentOS To Azure Linux

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

looks like a long commercial for Azure Linux tbh.

The presented reasons for the switch looks very weak to me.

NOTE: when will Microsoft guys learn to be case sensitive? It's systemd not SystemD

Microsoft Azure is the 2nd largest cloud provider in the world behind AWS, and it is gaining ground on Amazon. Google is in a distant 3rd place. I'd flip your statement around and say it would be bizarre for Microsoft to to use anything except what they are using to power Azure any time they are thinking about medium to large scale server deployments in their other business units.

[ahrs]

Not surprising given the Microsoft connection but not inevitable. Large organizations continue to use CentOS Stream and even contribute to it actively, including Meta and Twitter. Stream is upstream to RHEL and gets the updates first but different from the beta updates repo.

I suppose it depends on the corporations culture. Meta and Twitter (X, now) are both companies that don't mind adopting a "move fast and break stuff" mindset. If they run into problems they will indeed fix them and contribute them back.

The sort of companies that were running CentOS pre-Stream were looking for something boring and stable. They don't want something upstream of RHEL they want RHEL without having to pay for RHEL. CentOS used to give them that but still with the big backing of Red Hat. The only thing you didn't get was support but not everyone needs that. There are still a lot of people that consider Red Hat abandoning this model for CentOS as a huge mistake.

[cynic]

But as Michael’s recent file system shootout showed, it’s really a matter that all other file systems need to catch up to EXT4 and XFS in terms of speed, stability, development before they add other bells and whistles like CoW and dedupe and whatnot.

if you're referring to btrfs, COW is not something you "add" nor "bell and whistles". Indeed, it is part of the fundamental design.
also, speed is not the only feature that matters for a filesystem (otherwise we would all be using ext2)

[ezst036]

it would be bizarre for Microsoft to to use anything except what they are using to power Azure any time they are thinking about medium to large scale server deployments in their other business units.

Not really.

This is Microsoft.

It's bizarre that they would use Linux in any form at all when you would expect that they would be using Windows (Server).

[Weasel]

Maybe because Windows Server is so inferior they can't justify it in the slightest.

[spicfoo]

I suppose it depends on the corporations culture. Meta and Twitter (X, now) are both companies that don't mind adopting a "move fast and break stuff" mindset. If they run into problems they will indeed fix them and contribute them back.

I would say it is more about tech competence and focus rather than mindset. If you you have a good way to stage updates and avoid single points of failure, it is fairly standard to do a fleet update for a subset and roll over incrementally. If you are a legacy enterprise with large proprietary applications, maybe that's a problem but we do it all the time in tech focused organizations these days. You probably aren't going to be running Gentoo but CentOS Stream is fine for these people.

[Ironmask]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't LinkdIn using some other cloud provider? I recall MS trying to get them to use Azure after they bought them, but it failed and they had to stay with their current provider. If so, that's a really funny compromise that they're using Azure Linux but not on Azure.

[sophisticles]

Microsoft not using Windows Server on their servers? Whoa.

Maybe they wanted to save some money on the licensing fees. :-)

[kpedersen]

This is actually quite interesting. It means that Microsoft is actually committed to Azure Linux rather than a quick landgrab / viability test.

Usually Microsoft tend not to dogfood their more recent products. For example they almost always avoid .NET and stick to Win32/WinAPI for their own desktop products vs winrt/WinUI/WPF and all the other distractions.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't LinkdIn using some other cloud provider? I recall MS trying to get them to use Azure after they bought them, but it failed and they had to stay with their current provider. If so, that's a really funny compromise that they're using Azure Linux but not on Azure.

LinkedIn has its own data centers. AFAIR they paused the Azure migration because...

• Azure was growing like crazy and they wanted to keep as much available capacity as possible for external (paying) customers
• LinkedIn wanted to continue using some of its own software that wasn't available on Azure

They have now migrated their own data centers to use Azure Linux.