Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu

David Gerard writes "Wikimedia, the organization that runs Wikipedia and associated sites, has moved its server infrastructure entirely to Ubuntu 8.04 from a hodge-podge of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and various Fedora versions. 400 servers were involved and the project has been going on for 2 years. (There's also a small amount of OpenSolaris on the backend. All open source!)"

Comments

Re:CentOS is free RHEL

[1lus10n]

So here's a quick summary:
Fedora - Developers distro, not for servers and not for the "set it and forget it" crowd.

Debian Stable - Fully "set it and forget it". Literally.

CentOS/RHEL - Its the same thing. Literally. You might not like it because it "feels" like a kludge, but Red Hat isnt trying to win fan boys hearts, they are trying to win the war. Step one is to get people to stop talking about linux like its kool aid. (I like "my distro" best !)

The war doesnt start on people's desktops. It starts on their office machines.

Ubuntu - Desktop OS goes server. Change known quantity items for untested stuff because the guiding hands are college kids and hipsters.

The reality is this story shouldnt even be a story. The OS is obsolete. Apache, Squid, Oracle, Sendmail/Postfix, Jboss, Weblogic, Websphere, *LDAP, P* etc etc. They all run on every platform out there, the key is getting all your network, storage and platform (hardware + OS) items in a row so that the top level application can be spooled up and out in minutes.

Google accomplished this by writing middle tier software to allow spanning of thousands of systems (relatively) transparently. For those of us without that much time and money the next best thing is to standardize our platform and manage it with proper tools (ie puppet, splunk etc).