Sometimes it was hard to provide automation in the cases where deprecations happened and engineers had to make decisions on how to move forward. To make this possible, however, we needed to do comprehensive testing of the upgrade process and check that all major packages that had changed kept working (in Ubuntu this could be up to several thousands packages to upgrade between major versions). This automation focused approach meant that most of the Google employees didn't have to manually upgrade their machines by re-installing them and recreating all their configuration. To automate this process, we wrote an unattended in-place upgrade tool that took care of a lot of the common case problems. The productivity hit of having all engineers configure their workspace from scratch every two years was not a financially responsible option.įor each OS cycle, we had a rather large version jump in major packages that could require significant changes to software configuration. The complex nature of workloads run on corporate machines meant that reinstalling and fully customizing machines could be a difficult and time consuming operation. However, this two year release cycle for LTS releases also meant that we had to upgrade every machine in our fleet of over 100.000 devices before the end-of-life date of the OS. The Long Term Support (LTS) releases were picked as it was valued that Canonical provided 2+ years of security updates.
More than 15 years ago, Ubuntu was chosen as the base for the internal Linux distribution, as it was user-friendly, easy to use, and had lots of fancy extras. In 2018 we completed a move to a rolling release model based on Debian. For a long time, our internal facing Linux distribution, Goobuntu, was based off of Ubuntu LTS releases. To let each Googler work in the environment they are most productive in, we operate many OS-platforms including a Linux system. To support all our employees, including engineers, we also run a sizable corporate fleet with hundreds of thousands of devices across multiple platforms, models, and locations. At Google we run large production fleets that serve Google products like YouTube and Gmail.
0 kommentar(er)
