Consider removing AlmaLinux from Jetstream2 supported operating systems
Problem / Opportunity Statement
While temporarily disabling AlmaLinux 8 in the image build pipeline, I wondered: how many Almalinux instances does our community create, compared to other operating systems? Let's ask the database.
The following is an incomplete picture (e.g. may exclude volume-backed instances, biased towards projects that create many instances), but it's a glimpse.
| Operating system | # instances created past 7 days | % of total past 7 days | relevant image UUIDs past 7 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| AlmaLinux 8 | 7 | 0.8% | 7009d616-620c-4172-8901-0d2eeb55c434 |
| AlmaLinux 9 | 10 | 1.1% |
32062d65-5902-4d6f-9b39-7a850c45d091, a550e5b0-f3e8-474f-b595-d83da093c479, d48f2bc6-98d1-42be-a788-2ab61d606af7
|
| Rocky 8 | 31 | 3.6% |
8b825382-2c9f-43ef-87b0-126f84515f0b, f74e3439-7290-46e2-8a91-6ebffcb8154d, 72cc71ce-a8f0-4dc3-8928-b4b2209b82c4
|
| Rocky 9 | 72 | 8.2% |
e0963254-9116-414c-819a-4578b9a6bddf, e66d8f0f-dab3-4a18-b207-af35d83ec116, 725497c1-2f33-4e3b-a097-2d722342440e
|
| Ubuntu 20 | 79 | 9.0% |
b55d41fa-d870-4866-a8fc-c9a79867678c, 62eb761d-8d2e-44e0-a702-041695617305, 39e26d11-3882-47bd-8a5a-9685c68405e8
|
| Ubuntu 22 | 674 | 77.2% |
40b328fc-a10c-41e5-aa7e-2042982ed2cc, 146fa092-949c-46c7-8b0a-b217837cb521, 50898250-58bd-43fe-9564-fb5a6cc9f303
|
So, AlmaLinux 8 represents less than 1% of new instance creation. Both versions of AlmaLinux combined are less than 2%. Rocky Linux is 6 times more popular, and approximately equivalent in functionality to AlmaLinux. (Ubuntu is 7x again more popular than Rocky Linux).
It's non-trivial effort for us to continue maintaining two additional distros in the pipeline (guessing maybe 10-15 engineer hours in the past month). We aren't strictly obligated to offer Alma in addition to Rocky. We might cut the scope of support here to free ourselves for higher-priority tasks.
Resolution
Consider deprecating Almalinux featured images / official support for AlmaLinux. People could still use their existing Almalinux instances, and still create new instances from their own AlmaLinux images, but we wouldn't continue to provide official images.
This decision would need more information, opportunity for community input, and rough project-wide agreement. Maybe we do an Architecture Decision Record for it. (See example ADRs from the Exosphere project.)
Example query for reference:
Click to expand
mysql> SELECT COUNT(id) FROM nova.instances WHERE image_ref IN ("40b328fc-a10c-41e5-aa7e-2042982ed2cc", "146fa092-949c-46c7-8b0a-b217837cb521", "50898250-58bd-43fe-9564-fb5a6cc9f303") AND created_at > DATE(NOW() - INTERVAL 7 DAY);
+-----------+
| COUNT(id) |
+-----------+
| 674 |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.20 sec)