[master_crab]

For production Postgres, i would assume it’s close to almost no effect?

If someone is running postgres in a serious backend environment, i doubt they are using Ubuntu or even touching 7.x for months (or years). It’ll be some flavor of Debian or Red Hat still on 6.x (maybe even 5?). Those same users won’t touch 7.x until there has been months of testing by distros.

[crcastle]

Ubuntu is used in many serious backend environments. Heroku runs tens of thousands (if not more) instances of Ubuntu on its fleet. Or at least it did through the teens and early 2020s.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/stack

[nine_k]

Do they upgrade to the new LTS the day it is released?

[sakjur]

Ubuntu's upgrade tools wait until the .1 release for LTSes, so your typical installation would wait at least half a year.

[crcastle]

Not historically.

[rvnx]

and they are right, this is because a lot of junior sysadmins believe that newer = better.

But the reality:

  a) may get irreversible upgrades (e.g. new underlying database structure) 
  b) permanent worse performance / regression (e.g. iOS 26)
  c) added instability
  d) new security issues (litellm)
  e) time wasted migrating / debugging
  f) may need rewrite of consumers / users of APIs / sys calls
  g) potential new IP or licensing issues

etc.

A couple of the few reasons to upgrade something is:

  a) new features provide genuine comfort or performance upgrade (or... some revert)
  b) there is an extremely critical security issue
  c) you do not care about stability because reverting is uneventful and production impact is nil (e.g. Claude Code)

but 99% of the time, if ain't broke, don't fix it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...

[miki123211]

On the other hand, I suspect LLMs will dramatically decrease the window between a vulnerability being discovered and that vulnerability being exploited in the wild, especially for open-source projects.

Even if the vulnerability itself is discovered through other means than by an LLM, it's trivial to ask a SOTA model to "monitor all new commits to project X and decide which ones are likely patching an exploitable vulnerability, and then write a PoC." That's a lot easier than finding the vulnerable itself.

I won't be surprised if update windows (for open source networked services) shrink to ~10 minutes within a year or two. It's going to be a brutal world.

[mr_toad]

Too often I see IT departments use this as an excuse to only upgrade when they absolutely have to, usually with little to no testing in advance, which leaves them constantly being back-footed by incompatibility issues.

The idea of advanced testing of new versions of software (that they’ll be forced to use eventually) never seems to occur, or they spend so much time fighting fires they never get around to it.

[gjvc]

all fair points, on the other hand, as a general rule, isn't it important to stay on currently-supported versions of pieces of software that you run?

ymmv, but in my experience projects like postgresql which have been reliable, tend to continue to be so.

[rixed]

There is serious as in "corporate-serious" and serious as in "engineer-serious".

[zbentley]

I’ve seen more 5k+-core fleets running Ubuntu in prod than not, in my career. Industries include healthcare, US government, US government contractor, marketing, finance.

[rixed]

In other words, those industries that used to run windows before ?

[zbentley]

I'd say about 2/3 of the places I've worked started on Linux without a Windows precedent other than workstations. I can't speak for the experience of the founding staff, though; they might have preferred Ubuntu due to Windows experience--if so, I'm curious as to why/what those have to do with each other.

That said, Ubuntu in large production fleets isn't too bad. Sure, other distros are better, but Ubuntu's perfectly serviceable in that role. It needs talented SRE staff making sure automation, release engineering, monitoring, and de/provisioning behave well, but that's true of any you-run-the-underlying-VM large cloud deployment.

[pmontra]

A customer of mine is running on Ubuntu 22.04 and the plan is to upgrade to 26.04 in Q1 2027. We'll have to add performance regression to the plan.

[wongogue]

Are you running ARM servers?