[srobo-devel] Saffron and Fedora

[Peter Law]

Hi,

TL;DR: Saffron needs an upgrade soon, but we need to work out what the
longer-term hosting scenario will look like first.

Saffron is currently running Fedora 22, which will reach end-of-life a
month after Fedora 24 is released. This gives us about a month and a
half before we stop getting updates.

There are a number of options available to us at this point [0]:
- Move to Fedora 23 immediately
- Prepare then move to Fedora 24 when it arrives
- Move to something else

While we could move to F23 right now, it isn't really a viable
solution since it reaches EOL in December this year (looking at the
current plans for Fedora releases). We *really* don't want to be
shipping an OS upgrade in the middle of the competition portion of the
SR year.

We could move to F24 over the next month, just we moved to F22 last
year. I suspect that is doable and we could probably survive a few
months over the summer without updates, so the time-pressure here is
less than it first appears.

At Fedora's current release cadence this buys us about another year
until Fedora 24 expires and we need to do it again. As one of the two
people who tends to end up making these changes [1] I'd quite like to
reduce the frequency with which we need to do this, ideally picking a
distribution with long support windows so that get both stability and
regular updates

This brings me to the third option: moving to something else.

My personal choice of OS here would be Ubuntu. There are a number of
reasons for this:
- It has Long Term Support releases, backed by Enterprise-grade
support. While we won't use that support directly, its existence
should mean that the LTS releases are supported for the full duration
(and they have in the past).
- Its releases are time-based (like Fedora's), but still track the
latest and greatest versions of the software shipped (unlike RedHat).
It's not quite as bleeding edge as Fedora is, but I've not had any issues
with things being outdated in the past few years [2]..
- We already use Ubuntu for the competition VM with puppet configuring
things, so I know that this works and we have a starting point to reference.

The other consideration in this category is what the future of saffron
is in a more general manner. At the moment saffron is our only server
and handles everything from serving the public website to acting the
hub for our development efforts.

As I've heard rumours of moving some parts of what saffron does to
other forms of hosting I'd like to understand what, if any, plans
there are for that before committing to any course of upgrading.
Clearly if there's a plan to separate saffron's workload onto several
pieces that will affect both how it is configured and what the ideal
choice of platform is.

Clarity on the plans for saffron would be most welcome, as would
thoughts on choice of platform.

Thanks,
Peter

[0] Release data from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Fedora_releases#Version_history
and https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases; life cycle docs at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Life_Cycle
[1] Jeremy & I developed the majority of puppet changes for the moves
from F17 to F20 and from F20 to F22. Thankfully the latter was much
easier than the former. Please do shout if you'd like to help out!
[2] I run Ubuntu on my own machines, mostly the 14.04 LTS, and SR's
software runs fine.