What distribution is most used in production environment
I've come across Red Hat allot lately and am wondering if I need to get studying. I'm an avid Ubuntu server user but don't want to get stuck only knowing one distro.
What is the way to go if i want to know as much as I can for use in real world situations.
Ubuntu, RedHat, AWS Linux, Arch. Honestly distros in production are pretty similar since they're all headless and pretty pared-down. If you just know the logistics of a few package managers and init systems you'll be good.
I'm surprised to see arch on your list, I know everything runs in containers now but arch seems way too unstable O_o
By unstable I don't mean "buggy", but "you will have to adapt to new major version of package XXX or you can't fetch updates anymore, so no security patches anymore".
I didn’t find it more unstable or bleeding edge than anything else. All upgrades had to be tested and scripted anyway so the process for upgrading stuff was basically the same as any other distro. I honestly never ran into any of the problems people talked about here.
As for why it was chosen, the person in charge liked it and used it personally.
You mean you never received any major package update on arch ? 😛
More seriously, it depends on what we are talking about, if everything runs in container I agree that it kinda doesn't matter, you will just have a more up to date kernel, but it is stable enough.
Other peoples on this thread are talking about actual system dependancies, for example installing a postgres server from official repo. On this example it would require a database migration as soon as a major postgres version is released, which means some downtime and non-scheduled maintainance.
From my experience, the host doesn’t matter when you're using containers, VMs, or even containers inside VMs for your deployments.
Having said that, I prefer Debian for a single host just because I don’t have to think about it. Then again, what I’d be running on it won’t specific to Debian.
Nowadays you hear about “reproducible environments” for a good reason.