Recommended Distro for Web Applications

[leonardobgil at comcast.net (Leo Gil)]

This is what comes down to:

Prodution Servers: If your application needs high availability and you have
any serious auditing planned, you have to go with a commercial distribution.
I hate the idea of paying for Linux, but the business side of the house
always points to support. Depending on the customers you have, I bet they
won't like the idea of knowing the application they are paying you so much
money to provide is running out of a non-commercial distribution.

Development: Do whatever you want, BUT, remember that later you will have to
reproduce everything on development to a production site. This will involve
sometimes learning the difference between distributions, which can cause you
some problems if you don't have much time to go live with the developed
application (which doesn't happen very often right? :) ). Also, developers
and QA will blame you right away if you change their development environment
OS, before looking at their code.

So again, it all depends on what your customers require from you. 
If you decide to go with a commercial distribution, your decision will be
either Suse or RedHat. 

Suse has Novell backing them up and great support, but its not as used as
RedHat.

RedHat is the most used Linux distribution but became too expensive.

Try to save money on infrastructure servers (DNS, SMTP, syslog, etc...)
going with Gentoo. You'll also have lots of fun learning it.

Best regards

Leo

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at blu.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at blu.org] On Behalf Of
kirblam at comcast.net
Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2005 3:07 PM
To: discuss at blu.org
Subject: Recommended Distro for Web Applications

My company is making some of its first moves into looking at Linux
capabilities for web applications. We're a 95%+ Microsoft shop (my personal
experience is more broad, stop throwing things...) 

Anyway, my boss is pulling for a Red Hat license to get started. I'm not
sure what you really get with RH beside support that would make it
better/worse than other distros. I'm aware of the issues of excessive
packages that used to be trademark of previous RH versions.

For app development, you can assume we'll be experimenting with tomcat,
eclipse, php, maybe mono. It's probably a given we'll run some version of
apache.

Your feedback is very much appreciated.

Thanks,
jk 
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