Server Admins: Why not Fedora?

[Peter Robinson]

>> I propose that a good place to start here is to carefully enumerate
>> the reasons people elect not to use Fedora in their server
>> environments. Let's start by gathering the surface problems (in some
>> cases, the cargo-cult explanations) and look into what is the real
>> underlying problem and how we can fix it with the Fedora Server offering.
>
> The following is from a sysadmin friend of mine who asks to remain anonymous
> for work-related reasons:
>
>   At my work (Fortune 100 company) there's no way we could tolerate a 6
>   month release cycle. Likely you know this. I doubt the company would ever
>   consider Fedora for anything. Currently there are a few rogue Ubuntu and
>   CentOS boxes around and we do have some appliances that run Debian. Out of
>   over 2,000 Linux servers I think there was one Fedora box, i believe it
>   was recently decommissioned (not sure what replaced it).

While the dev cycle is 6 months the support cycle for each release is 13 months.

I'm finding more and more companies are considering or even using
Fedora for certain use cases because they deploy everything using
kickstarts and manage them using config management. They upgrade their
release every 12 months or so and their instances of Fedora don't tend
to be long living (some may be as low as a few days, most a few
months). They don't tend to upgrade them but rather tear down and
redeploy because decent config management allows this to be simple and
automated and they find on the server side of things that very little
breaks release to release.

Peter