Alternatives to CentOS logo

Alternatives to CentOS

Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Amazon Linux, and openSUSE are the most popular alternatives and competitors to CentOS.
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What is CentOS and what are its top alternatives?

CentOS is a popular Linux distribution known for its stability and long-term support, making it a suitable choice for servers and enterprise environments. Key features include regular security updates, access to a large repository of software packages, and compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, CentOS recently announced a shift in focus towards CentOS Stream, leaving users looking for alternatives to maintain the traditional CentOS model.

  1. Ubuntu Server: Ubuntu Server is a widely used Linux distribution known for its ease of use, strong community support, and regular releases. Pros include a large software repository, long-term support options, and straightforward upgrades. Cons may include a different package management system compared to CentOS.
  2. Debian: Debian is a robust Linux distribution known for its stability, security, and extensive package selection. Key features include a strong focus on free and open-source software, regular security updates, and multiple architectures support. However, the release cycle may be slower compared to CentOS.
  3. Fedora Server: Fedora Server offers the latest in open-source technologies, frequent updates, and a strong focus on innovation. Pros include cutting-edge software packages, a user-friendly interface, and a vibrant community. On the downside, the short lifecycle of each release may require more frequent upgrades.
  4. openSUSE: openSUSE is a user-friendly Linux distribution with both a stable release and a rolling release option. Key features include the YaST configuration tool, a wide range of software packages, and strong support for desktop and server environments. However, some users may find the release cycle and version upgrades challenging.
  5. Rocky Linux: Rocky Linux aims to provide a downstream, community-supported, free Linux distribution that is binary compatible with RHEL. Pros include a focus on maintaining CentOS-like stability and support for long-term releases. Cons may include a shorter track record compared to more established alternatives.
  6. AlmaLinux: AlmaLinux is another CentOS replacement that aims to provide a stable, community-driven, open-source Linux distribution. Key features include compatibility with RHEL, long-term support options, and an active community. However, users may encounter challenges in transitioning from CentOS to AlmaLinux.
  7. Oracle Linux: Oracle Linux is an enterprise-class Linux distribution built from RHEL source code, offering premier support options, compatibility with Oracle products, and advanced security features. Pros include additional testing and optimization for Oracle workloads, but licensing considerations and support costs may be a concern for some users.
  8. ClearOS: ClearOS is a Linux distribution specifically designed for small and medium-sized businesses, offering a user-friendly interface, a wide range of server applications, and a marketplace for additional features. Pros include ease of use and centralized management tools, while potential cons may include a focus on specific business use cases.
  9. Mageia: Mageia is a community-driven Linux distribution focused on desktop and server use, offering a customizable installation process, a wide range of software packages, and strong security features. Pros include a supportive community and a focus on user experience, but the release cycle and support options may vary compared to CentOS.
  10. Slackware: Slackware is one of the oldest actively maintained Linux distributions, known for its simplicity, stability, and adherence to Unix-like principles. Key features include a minimalistic approach, lightweight system requirements, and a high level of customization. However, the lack of graphical tools and package management may be challenging for some users.

Top Alternatives to CentOS

  • Ubuntu
    Ubuntu

    Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers. ...

  • Fedora
    Fedora

    Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that provides users with access to the latest free and open source software, in a stable, secure and easy to manage form. Fedora is the largest of many free software creations of the Fedora Project. Because of its predominance, the word "Fedora" is often used interchangeably to mean both the Fedora Project and the Fedora operating system. ...

  • Debian
    Debian

    Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. FreeBSD is an operating system including a kernel and other software. ...

  • Amazon Linux
    Amazon Linux

    The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). ...

  • openSUSE
    openSUSE

    The openSUSE project is a worldwide effort that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. openSUSE creates one of the world's best Linux distributions, working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source Software community. ...

  • Linux
    Linux

    A clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance. ...

  • JavaScript
    JavaScript

    JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles. ...

  • Git
    Git

    Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. ...

CentOS alternatives & related posts

Ubuntu logo

Ubuntu

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The leading OS for PC, tablet, phone and cloud
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PROS OF UBUNTU
  • 230
    Free to use
  • 96
    Easy setup for testing discord bot
  • 57
    Gateway Linux Distro
  • 54
    Simple interface
  • 9
    Don't need driver installation in most cases
  • 6
    Open Source
  • 6
    Many active communities
  • 3
    Software Availability
  • 3
    Easy to custom
  • 2
    Many flavors/distros based on ubuntu
  • 1
    Lightweight container base OS
  • 1
    Great OotB Linux Shell Experience
CONS OF UBUNTU
  • 5
    Demanding system requirements
  • 4
    Adds overhead and unnecessary complexity over Debian
  • 2
    Snapd installed by default
  • 1
    Systemd

related Ubuntu posts

CDG

I use Laravel because it's the most advances PHP framework out there, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade and most of all : easy to get a handle on, and to follow every new technology ! PhpStorm is our main software to code, as of simplicity and full range of tools for a modern application.

Google Analytics Analytics of course for a tailored analytics, Bulma as an innovative CSS framework, coupled with our Sass (Scss) pre-processor.

As of more basic stuff, we use HTML5, JavaScript (but with Vue.js too) and Webpack to handle the generation of all this.

To deploy, we set up Buddy to easily send the updates on our nginx / Ubuntu server, where it will connect to our GitHub Git private repository, pull and do all the operations needed with Deployer .

CloudFlare ensure the rapidity of distribution of our content, and Let's Encrypt the https certificate that is more than necessary when we'll want to sell some products with our Stripe api calls.

Asana is here to let us list all the functionalities, possibilities and ideas we want to implement.

See more
Tassanai Singprom

This is my stack in Application & Data

JavaScript PHP HTML5 jQuery Redis Amazon EC2 Ubuntu Sass Vue.js Firebase Laravel Lumen Amazon RDS GraphQL MariaDB

My Utilities Tools

Google Analytics Postman Elasticsearch

My Devops Tools

Git GitHub GitLab npm Visual Studio Code Kibana Sentry BrowserStack

My Business Tools

Slack

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Fedora logo

Fedora

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Operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project
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PROS OF FEDORA
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    Great for developers
  • 10
    Great integration with system tools
  • 10
    Represents the future of rhel/centos
  • 9
    Good release schedule
  • 7
    Reliable
  • 6
    Fast
  • 5
    Docker integration
  • 4
    Has SeLinux
  • 3
    Latest packages
  • 3
    Updated with Bleeding-edge software
  • 3
    Great for ops teams
  • 3
    Awesome community
  • 2
    Python distribution
  • 2
    Complies with International Standard
CONS OF FEDORA
  • 3
    Bugs get fixed slowly from kernel side
  • 2
    Much less support from Wiki
  • 2
    Systemd
  • 2
    Boring
  • 1
    Less packages in official repository
  • 1
    A bit complicated
  • 1
    Learning curve for new users
  • 0
    Slightly difficult to install for beginners

related Fedora posts

Tim Abbott
Shared insights
on
DebianDebianUbuntuUbuntuFedoraFedora
at

We use Debian and its derivative Ubuntu because the apt ecosystem and toolchain for Debian packages is far superior to the yum-based system used by Fedora and RHEL. This is large part due to a huge amount of investment into tools like debhelper/dh over the years by the Debian community. I haven't dealt with RPM in the last couple years, but every experience I've had with RPM is that the RPM tools are slower, have less useful options, and it's more work to package software for them (and one makes more compromises in doing so).

I think everyone has seen the better experience using Ubuntu in the shift of prevalence from RHEL to Ubuntu in what most new companies are deploying on their servers, and I expect that trend to continue as long as Red Hat is using the RPM system (and I don't really see them as having a path to migrate).

The experience with Ubuntu and Debian stable releases is pretty similar: A solid release every 2 years that's supported for a few years. (While Ubuntu in theory releases every 6 months, their non-LTS releases are effectively betas: They're often unstable, only have 9 months of support, etc. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone not actively participating in Ubuntu the development community). Ubuntu has better integration of non-free drivers, which may be important if you have hardware that requires them. But it's also the case that most bugs I experience when using Ubuntu are Ubuntu-specific issues, especially on servers (in part because Ubuntu has a bunch of "cloud management" stuff pre-installed that is definitely a regression if you're not using Canonical's cloud management products).

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Marcel Kornegoor

Since #ATComputing is a vendor independent Linux and open source specialist, we do not have a favorite Linux distribution. We mainly use Ubuntu , Centos Debian , Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora during our daily work. These are also the distributions we see most often used in our customers environments.

For our #ci/cd training, we use an open source pipeline that is build around Visual Studio Code , Jenkins , VirtualBox , GitHub , Docker Kubernetes and Google Compute Engine.

For #ServerConfigurationAndAutomation, we have embraced and contributed to Ansible mainly because it is not only flexible and powerful, but also straightforward and easier to learn than some other (open source) solutions. On the other hand: we are not affraid of Puppet Labs and Chef either.

Currently, our most popular #programming #Language course is Python . The reason Python is so popular has to do with it's versatility, but also with its low complexity. This helps sysadmins to write scripts or simple programs to make their job less repetitive and automating things more fun. Python is also widely used to communicate with (REST) API's and for data analysis.

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Debian logo

Debian

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The Universal Operating System
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PROS OF DEBIAN
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    Massively supported
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    Stable
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    Reliable
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    Aptitude
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    Customizable
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    It is free
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    Turnkey linux use it
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    Works on all architectures
CONS OF DEBIAN
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    Old versions of software
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    Can be difficult to set up on vanilla Debian

related Debian posts

Labinator Team

At labinator.com, we use HTML5, CSS 3, Sass, Vanilla.JS and PHP when building our premium WordPress themes and plugins. When writing our codes, we use Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code depending on the project. We run Manjaro and Debian operating systems in our office. Manjaro is a great desktop operating system for all range of tasks while Debian is a solid choice for servers.

WordPress became a very popular choice when it comes to content management systems and building websites. It is easy to learn and has a great community behind it. The high number of plugins as well that are available for WordPress allows any user to customize it depending on his/her needs.

For development, HTML5 with Sass is our go-to choice when building our themes.

Main Advantages Of Sass:

  • It's CSS syntax friendly
  • It offers variables
  • It uses a nested syntax
  • It includes mixins
  • Great community and online support.
  • Great documentation that is easy to read and follow.

As for PHP, we always thrive to use PHP 7.3+. After the introduction of PHP 7, the WordPress development process became more stable and reliable than before. If you a developer considering PHP 7.3+ for your project, it would be good to note the following benefits.

The Benefits Of Using PHP:

  • Open Source.
  • Highly Extendible.
  • Easy to learn and read.
  • Platform independent.
  • Compatible with APACHE.
  • Low development and maintenance cost.
  • Great community and support.
  • Detailed documentation that has everything you need!

Why PHP 7.3+?

  • Flexible Heredoc & Nowdoc Syntaxes - Two key methods for defining strings within PHP. They also became easier to read and more reliable.
  • A good boost in performance speed which is extremely important when it comes to WordPress development.
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Jason Martin
Senior PHP Developer at Orange · | 14 upvotes · 86.2K views
Shared insights
on
LaravelLaravelMySQLMySQLDebianDebian

For your purposes, I recommend @Laravel, or even @Symfony or @Yii, or whatever. In your use case, a framework is 100% indicated, because it will cut your boilerplate in half or more, and you'll have a pre-fab organization for files, classes and so on. Personally, I am not a fan of Frameworks, because they tend to take over your project like cancer and trap you. But for an internal app to manage stuff, it's probably the best idea to use one (preferably one you like).

When doing internal apps, your best bet is to stick the essentials and basics, try Laravel with MySQL on a nice Debian virtual machine. Can't go wrong.

See more
Amazon Linux logo

Amazon Linux

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The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use...
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PROS OF AMAZON LINUX
    Be the first to leave a pro
    CONS OF AMAZON LINUX
      Be the first to leave a con

      related Amazon Linux posts

      openSUSE logo

      openSUSE

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      The makers' choice for sysadmins, developers and desktop users
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      PROS OF OPENSUSE
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        Stable
      • 3
        Lightweight for server
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        Snapshot
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        Rolling release
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        Reliable
      CONS OF OPENSUSE
        Be the first to leave a con

        related openSUSE posts

        Linux logo

        Linux

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        A family of free and open source software operating systems based on the Linux kernel
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        PROS OF LINUX
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          Open Source
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          Free
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          Reliability
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          Safe
        CONS OF LINUX
          Be the first to leave a con

          related Linux posts

          I use Visual Studio Code because at this time is a mature software and I can do practically everything using it.

          • It's free and open source: The project is hosted on GitHub and it’s free to download, fork, modify and contribute to the project.

          • Multi-platform: You can download binaries for different platforms, included Windows (x64), MacOS and Linux (.rpm and .deb packages)

          • LightWeight: It runs smoothly in different devices. It has an average memory and CPU usage. Starts almost immediately and it’s very stable.

          • Extended language support: Supports by default the majority of the most used languages and syntax like JavaScript, HTML, C#, Swift, Java, PHP, Python and others. Also, VS Code supports different file types associated to projects like .ini, .properties, XML and JSON files.

          • Integrated tools: Includes an integrated terminal, debugger, problem list and console output inspector. The project navigator sidebar is simple and powerful: you can manage your files and folders with ease. The command palette helps you find commands by text. The search widget has a powerful auto-complete feature to search and find your files.

          • Extensible and configurable: There are many extensions available for every language supported, including syntax highlighters, IntelliSense and code completion, and debuggers. There are also extension to manage application configuration and architecture like Docker and Jenkins.

          • Integrated with Git: You can visually manage your project repositories, pull, commit and push your changes, and easy conflict resolution.( there is support for SVN (Subversion) users by plugin)

          See more
          Wesly Nouse

          We use G Suite because of its cheap costs, easy management/administration, Excellent DKIM score, and everything that comes with it. We switched from Microsoft Office 365 because it doesn't work on Linux which is our OS of choice. Furthermore, G Suite does not lack any of the features that Office365 had to offer, I'd even say it offers more.

          See more
          JavaScript logo

          JavaScript

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          Lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions
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          PROS OF JAVASCRIPT
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            Can be used on frontend/backend
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            It's everywhere
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            Lots of great frameworks
          • 898
            Fast
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            Light weight
          • 425
            Flexible
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            You can't get a device today that doesn't run js
          • 286
            Non-blocking i/o
          • 237
            Ubiquitousness
          • 191
            Expressive
          • 55
            Extended functionality to web pages
          • 49
            Relatively easy language
          • 46
            Executed on the client side
          • 30
            Relatively fast to the end user
          • 25
            Pure Javascript
          • 21
            Functional programming
          • 15
            Async
          • 13
            Full-stack
          • 12
            Setup is easy
          • 12
            Future Language of The Web
          • 12
            Its everywhere
          • 11
            Because I love functions
          • 11
            JavaScript is the New PHP
          • 10
            Like it or not, JS is part of the web standard
          • 9
            Expansive community
          • 9
            Everyone use it
          • 9
            Can be used in backend, frontend and DB
          • 9
            Easy
          • 8
            Most Popular Language in the World
          • 8
            Powerful
          • 8
            Can be used both as frontend and backend as well
          • 8
            For the good parts
          • 8
            No need to use PHP
          • 8
            Easy to hire developers
          • 7
            Agile, packages simple to use
          • 7
            Love-hate relationship
          • 7
            Photoshop has 3 JS runtimes built in
          • 7
            Evolution of C
          • 7
            It's fun
          • 7
            Hard not to use
          • 7
            Versitile
          • 7
            Its fun and fast
          • 7
            Nice
          • 7
            Popularized Class-Less Architecture & Lambdas
          • 7
            Supports lambdas and closures
          • 6
            It let's me use Babel & Typescript
          • 6
            Can be used on frontend/backend/Mobile/create PRO Ui
          • 6
            1.6K Can be used on frontend/backend
          • 6
            Client side JS uses the visitors CPU to save Server Res
          • 6
            Easy to make something
          • 5
            Clojurescript
          • 5
            Promise relationship
          • 5
            Stockholm Syndrome
          • 5
            Function expressions are useful for callbacks
          • 5
            Scope manipulation
          • 5
            Everywhere
          • 5
            Client processing
          • 5
            What to add
          • 4
            Because it is so simple and lightweight
          • 4
            Only Programming language on browser
          • 1
            Test
          • 1
            Hard to learn
          • 1
            Test2
          • 1
            Not the best
          • 1
            Easy to understand
          • 1
            Subskill #4
          • 1
            Easy to learn
          • 0
            Hard 彤
          CONS OF JAVASCRIPT
          • 22
            A constant moving target, too much churn
          • 20
            Horribly inconsistent
          • 15
            Javascript is the New PHP
          • 9
            No ability to monitor memory utilitization
          • 8
            Shows Zero output in case of ANY error
          • 7
            Thinks strange results are better than errors
          • 6
            Can be ugly
          • 3
            No GitHub
          • 2
            Slow
          • 0
            HORRIBLE DOCUMENTS, faulty code, repo has bugs

          related JavaScript posts

          Zach Holman

          Oof. I have truly hated JavaScript for a long time. Like, for over twenty years now. Like, since the Clinton administration. It's always been a nightmare to deal with all of the aspects of that silly language.

          But wowza, things have changed. Tooling is just way, way better. I'm primarily web-oriented, and using React and Apollo together the past few years really opened my eyes to building rich apps. And I deeply apologize for using the phrase rich apps; I don't think I've ever said such Enterprisey words before.

          But yeah, things are different now. I still love Rails, and still use it for a lot of apps I build. But it's that silly rich apps phrase that's the problem. Users have way more comprehensive expectations than they did even five years ago, and the JS community does a good job at building tools and tech that tackle the problems of making heavy, complicated UI and frontend work.

          Obviously there's a lot of things happening here, so just saying "JavaScript isn't terrible" might encompass a huge amount of libraries and frameworks. But if you're like me, yeah, give things another shot- I'm somehow not hating on JavaScript anymore and... gulp... I kinda love it.

          See more
          Conor Myhrvold
          Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 12.3M views

          How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:

          Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.

          Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:

          https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

          (GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

          Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

          See more
          Git logo

          Git

          296.1K
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          Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system
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          PROS OF GIT
          • 1.4K
            Distributed version control system
          • 1.1K
            Efficient branching and merging
          • 959
            Fast
          • 845
            Open source
          • 726
            Better than svn
          • 368
            Great command-line application
          • 306
            Simple
          • 291
            Free
          • 232
            Easy to use
          • 222
            Does not require server
          • 27
            Distributed
          • 22
            Small & Fast
          • 18
            Feature based workflow
          • 15
            Staging Area
          • 13
            Most wide-spread VSC
          • 11
            Role-based codelines
          • 11
            Disposable Experimentation
          • 7
            Frictionless Context Switching
          • 6
            Data Assurance
          • 5
            Efficient
          • 4
            Just awesome
          • 3
            Github integration
          • 3
            Easy branching and merging
          • 2
            Compatible
          • 2
            Flexible
          • 2
            Possible to lose history and commits
          • 1
            Rebase supported natively; reflog; access to plumbing
          • 1
            Light
          • 1
            Team Integration
          • 1
            Fast, scalable, distributed revision control system
          • 1
            Easy
          • 1
            Flexible, easy, Safe, and fast
          • 1
            CLI is great, but the GUI tools are awesome
          • 1
            It's what you do
          • 0
            Phinx
          CONS OF GIT
          • 16
            Hard to learn
          • 11
            Inconsistent command line interface
          • 9
            Easy to lose uncommitted work
          • 7
            Worst documentation ever possibly made
          • 5
            Awful merge handling
          • 3
            Unexistent preventive security flows
          • 3
            Rebase hell
          • 2
            When --force is disabled, cannot rebase
          • 2
            Ironically even die-hard supporters screw up badly
          • 1
            Doesn't scale for big data

          related Git posts

          Simon Reymann
          Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 10.6M views

          Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

          • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
          • Respectively Git as revision control system
          • SourceTree as Git GUI
          • Visual Studio Code as IDE
          • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
          • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
          • SonarQube as quality gate
          • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
          • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
          • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
          • Heroku for deploying in test environments
          • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
          • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
          • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
          • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
          • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

          The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

          • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
          • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
          • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
          • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
          • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
          • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
          See more
          Tymoteusz Paul
          Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 9.5M views

          Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

          It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

          I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

          We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

          If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

          The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

          Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

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