> If, for now, you prefer stability over speed, you can get still get going with Livepatch by reverting to the old kernel,
Ha, that's not the most inspirational ending.
I would have hoped that stability doesn't even need to be mentioned, considering that this is now one of the default images on AWS. I don't think anyone would choose this kernel if they thought there might be a higher chance of it crashing and taking down their server.
Cool — now to finally get around to moving to 16.04 :-)
Each time I look at what the last stable Ubuntu release is, I feel like the years are rushing by too fast. I slowly drift further and further behind schedule, though it still doesn't seem a minute since 10.04 came out!
Had a similar conversation about that just yesterday. Our company is using 12.04 and I was nearly floored to see it is soon entering end of life... A quick test of 16.04 says, wow it is not going to be fun for us to upgrade...
One of the most valuable aspects of Debian was (and hopefully is and will always be) the fact that a release upgrade was always possible and (at least for me) never caused any problems (rtm of course).
The idea of "LTS" is a stupid reversion of something better we already had - the idea that upgrades are always reliable.
Saying "LTS" for me sounds like "we have lost control over the upgrade process."
Of course I must add that updating from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 went ok on all machines I have seen (servers and also desktop workstations) - this should not be surprising, but the expected default, then we do not need no "LTS" theater.
LTS is a guideline about extended support, extended beta cycles, and less potentially breaking changes vs the non-LTS releases. I don't see it as saying much of anything about the upgrade path, but rather that if you do an apt-get update on an existing LTS box, you can expect to not get major version bumps of tools and libraries and thus less breakage. Of course, you don't get the latest and greatest software, but for most server deployments, that's a desired compromise.
And at least I never do an upgrade anyway -- I always do a fresh install from one LTS to the next one on bare metal -- and simply recycle VMs in the cloud.
One of the major issues with current transitions is apache 2.2 to 2.4+ and other such large gaps that unfortunately will require manual configuration changes. There are many such instances of these gaps depending on where you are coming from and going to.
LTS is not about how reliable the upgrade from one version of the distribution to another is. It's about how long security and bug fixes will be provided for a version of the distribution.
An Ubuntu LTS gets updates for 60 months. A non-LTS release gets updates for 9 months.
I went through all the 2-year releases since 10.04 and if you go through it for every release it's a fairly small incremental change for the most part.
That being said, systemd is a larger change, but I just use a single script to start supervisord, then run all my stuff under that anyway.
We're moving from 14.04 to 16.04 and are about done with our migration development - the biggest difference I saw was systemd by default, although for the simple things we do with startup weren't too hard to migrate over. The other only other thing that impacted us was some changes in how the apt and puppet versions that are included by default act, a few things were either more strict or the (previously deprecated) things had actually been removed.
Python 2 is not there. If you run on AWS, either have a task to download and install Python 2, or in your EC2's user data to install Python 2 (this is necessary for Ansible users).
Ironic since Ansible's lack of Python 3 support was due to vociferous insistence by key Ansible developers that it would be wrong even to allow the use of Ansible with Python 3 as long as popular CentOS versions did not have it.
I think the bigger reason was Ansible needed to support Python 2.4 and 2.5 for old CentOS versions, making simultaneous Python 3 support very hard. They've now dropped 2.4 and 2.5, thus allowing Python 3 compatibility.
I have to read it backward. Ansible is now part of RedHat. CentOS doesn't have Python 3, and some key Ansible developers have strong opinion on Ansible not supporting Python 3 in the near future. Am I reading it right?
The built in support for ENA is nice but what about the other instances such as C3, C4, D2, I2, R3, and M4 (excluding m4.16xlarge) where you have EN using Intel 82599 Virtual Function interface? Why not support it out of the box?
The latest Amazon Ubuntu 16.04 AMI comes with ixgbevf version 2.12.1-k, while the Enhanced Networking documentation [1] suggests installing version 2.16.4.
I'm not seeing any speed increase when using an ENA vs non-ENA ami as seen by iperf. ami-80861296 vs ami-2757f631; tested transfer between pairs of m4.large and m4.xl VM-s.
Ha, that's not the most inspirational ending.
I would have hoped that stability doesn't even need to be mentioned, considering that this is now one of the default images on AWS. I don't think anyone would choose this kernel if they thought there might be a higher chance of it crashing and taking down their server.