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by mvanbaak 3114 days ago
"It includes systemd service and systems manager as opposed to System V init system"

I'm off to rewrite/test/fix all ansible and puppet modules so they support FreeBSD. I had hoped AWS was smart enough to stay sober, but no. Too bad, I liked AWS Linux.

2 comments

I don't know about you, but I like how systemd can restart my processes if they die. sysvinit is ancient; time to move on.
Systemd is a huge improvement for sure. There's some effort involved in understanding new things, and this is one which has ultimately made our lives much easier. I say this as someone who maintains the OS for a large AWS deployment and has made the effort the understand it rather than run away in irrational fear.
I've been managing all my application daemons with supervisord across systems for this reason - it's agnostic as to the underlying init system, can restart crashed daemons, and provides the same kind of "service up/down" functionality as sysv or systemd. Systemd can do quite a lot, but if you have to do any kind of orchestration across nonhomogenous machines, you can't necessarily count on it being in play.
The nice thing about systemd is that it works the same across various Linux distros (unlike even sysvinit!). So I've been solving this problem by pushing everyone to upgrade to a version that supports systemd. :-)

I would really like to see something UI-compatible with systemd that works on non-Linux, though.

Yeah ditto, avoided Amazon Linux for ages since I didn't want to replace my .service files with shell scripts, forever/monit etc, and logging to 'local4'.
Yes, pity. The lack of systemd is a major driver for use of Amazon Linux for us and our efforts to get away from Red Hat. We won't be adopting AL 2 because of this (not if I can help it anyway). I had actually thought that AL not adopting systemd was a sign of clue, but it seems it was just slowness. Let's hope they leave the original AL around long enough to find alternatives we can trust.
Systemd, for all its flaws, is vastly superior to sysvinit. Running from it is only delaying the inevitable.

Red Hat is not systemd. You'll find it in Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE, Arch, and RHEL/CentOS/Scientific.