Facebook and Twitter want to enable CentOS Stream for large scale deployments

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Developers from Facebook and Twitter have proposed a new special interest group (SIG) to enable CentOS Stream for deployment on large scale infrastructure.

The move is significant as it comes on the back of the recent backlash the project has received for prematurely axing the development of CentOS to instead focus on CentOS Stream. 

As per reports, the proposed Hyperscale SIG is pitched to enable CentOS Stream to be usable on large scale infrastructures such as those in use at Facebook, Twitter, and in similar setups like cloud providers.

Value in CentOS Stream

The developers note three broad areas they’d like the SIG to focus on. To begin with, the SIG would track certain relevant packages at a faster pace. These would be quickly packaged and available to CentOS Stream users via their own repositories. 

“The goal is for these backports to be drop-in replacements for the distro-provided packages and to offer the same degree of stability,” the developers explain in their proposal.

The developers write that they also hope the SIG will “make it easier to test distro-wide changes to ease their development and integration.” They use the example of the ongoing work to enable copy-on-write support in the DNF and RPM package management tools, and argue that the proposed SIG could help test such important work in a production deployment.

The CentOS Hyperscale SIG will be voted upon at this week's CentOS board meeting. If accepted it’ll be co-chaired by Facebook’s Davide Cavalca and Twitter’s Justin Vreeland. Besides them, the proposed SIG lists several other engineers as initial members, from other major companies such as Verizon.

Via: Phoronix

Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.