CentOS Hyperscale SIG Continues Adapting CentOS Stream For Large Scale Deployments

For the past nearly two years the CentOS Hyperscale effort has been working on adapting CentOS Stream to make it more applicable for use within large scale deployments like those at Twitter, Facebook/Meta, and other large companies. This week the special interest group published their latest quarterly report outlining their activities.

The CentOS Hyperscale SIG has fundamentally been about providing updated packages to complement what is otherwise available in CentOS Stream and EPEL, enabling interesting features relevant to the hyperscalers not yet found in CentOS Stream, and in some cases providing various kernel and systemd updates/changes and other modifications to suit their needs. The SIG is backed by engineers from the prominent "hyperscale" companies.

This past quarter they pushed an updated systemd to their repository, publishing a new kernel build for Enterprise Linux 8 / CentOS Stream 8, fully-automated their container image creation, and working on improving the creation of their CentOS Hyperscale spin ISOs/images. For their spin they are looking to leverage KIWI for creating their images and have been working with the CentOS infrastructure team to get that all squared away.

In 2022'Q3 the CentOS Hyperscale SIG has also pushed out updated Wireshark packages for CentOS Stream 8 and 9, worked on a Hyperscale backport of QEMU as part of their work on getting QEMU also in EPEL, and other packaging work.

One of the CentOS Hyperscale initiatives that has long been ongoing is enabling copy-on-write support with DNF/RPM. There have been fixes and improvements that continued to happen there over the past quarter.

Moving forward the CentOS Hyperscale crew is planning to integrate Btrfs transactional updates as an optional feature, getting an updated QEMU in EPEL, and finishing up work on their spin image build infrastructure.

More details on the CentOS Hyperscale work in the third quarter can be found via the CentOS blog.