As part of a massive migration campaign, LinkedIn has successfully moved their operations to Microsoft’s Azure Linux as of April 2024, ditching CentOS 7 in the process and taking advantage of a more modern compute platform.
As many of you might already know, back on June 30, 2024, CentOS 7 reached the end-of-life status, resulting in no new future updates for it, including fixes for critical security vulnerabilities.
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The developers have gone with the high-performing XFS filesystem, which was made to work with Azure Linux to fit LinkedIn’s use case. In their testing, they found that XFS was performing well for most of their applications, except Hadoop, which is used for their analytics workloads.
When they compared the issues that cropped up, XFS came out as a more stable and reliable choice than the other candidate, Ext4.
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Additionally, LinkedIn’s MaaS (Metal-as-a-Service) team has developed a new Azure Linux Image Customizer tool for automating image generation, that takes an existing generic Azure Linux image, and modifies it to use with a given scenario. In this case, a tailored image for LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Engineering Blog: Navigating the transition: adopting Azure Linux as LinkedIn’s operating system
So, somebody that was generating no revenue for Red Hat is not generating revenue for Red Het? Sounds like a real catastrophe for them.
Also, if I had to guess, I would say that Azure Linux is based on CentOS Stream. So, whatever “halo” they had before is mostly still in place.
Most importantly though, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft as is Azure Linux. So I am not sure what kid of bellwether this is.
Are they most using Azure Linux? Or Azure? If Azure, no headline. If they are not using Azure, why not? That would be the headline here.
I’m sure that’s how they’re thinking. It will cause their platform to slowly fade into irrelevance though.