[fu86]

We have a shitload of servers running CentOS for historical reasons. We can't change the distribution because all the services running on this servers are tight to the quirks and special cases of this distribution. So we need to live with CentOS.

Some of our newer services need a up to date version of glibc and a lot of other dependencies CentOS can't provide. So we use docker to boot up Ubuntu 14.04 containers and run the services with special needs in them.

Another great thing is isolating scripts we don't trust. We allow our customers to run scripts of all kind on our servers --> inside Docker containers. So the customers can't mess with the hostsystem.

[liviu-]

>running CentOS for historical reasons

Is CentOS not the state-of-the-art Linux distro to run for servers (besides RHEL for support)?

[njharman]

Maybe safe-of-the-art. It is stable (and old) which is the way many people like their servers. But, it certainly isn't the latest and greatest.

[cheald]

The entire point of RHEL/CentOS is that it isn't bleeding edge; it will certainly be modern though. I think it's rather unfair to call it "old" though; the latest release was in March.

[njharman]

Fair enough. But the mentality that picks stable over up-to-date tends to never upgrade. I'm stuck supporting rhel5.5, our "new" systems are 6.5

[fu86]

If you are hosting gameservers, it just does not fit.

[ecliptik]

This is what we do. Existing stable CentOS/RHEL environment that we can deploy other OS containers to (specifically Ubuntu 14.04) without having to stand up entire new VMs or metal.