Evaluate operating system choices

[colearendt]

• Bionic is scheduled for EOL April 2023
• Our OS choices impact our customers, because we only build bionic (for now). And CentOS7 for r-session-complete
• We have had many requests for CentOS / RHEL (i.e. RSC Centos7 image  #111 , Create CentOS 8 image for r-session-complete #225 , in several customer calls, etc.)
• Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish has been released, which has

We should decide:

• do we have enough collective buy-in / dev effort to start forking the build matrix and maintaining different distros? How many? For which products? (i.e. RSPM is arguably impacted least / is most OS agnostic)
• at what point should we pull the trigger on stopping bionic builds?
• when should the latest / versioned images change off of bionic
• tag paradigms to make these types of differences clearer / cleaner? (related to Helper display page for exploring images #302 )
• build images less, and possibly with additional versioning #255 so that the number of versions we build is minimized in the face of more OS's
• desired product features / documentation to make migration across OS easier
  • i.e. RSC with Launcher arguably makes the OS switch for the "main" service less of an issue
  • finding a way to build r-session-complete less often (i.e. more like the content images) could simplify effort considerably or merge the image with content for RSC. However, this is likely to take a long time for customers to pick up...
• how to stage this change to minimize impact (i.e. couple with a versioned release, etc.)

Notes:

• https://hub.docker.com/r/redhat/ubi8 (for RHEL)
• https://hub.docker.com/_/ubuntu (ubuntu:jammy)
• Not all images need to move at the same time. But we should explain / prepare customers appropriately so they can plan. There could be improvements in our notification streams / channels, etc.

[bdeitte]

We should consider at least talking to AWS and AzureML about our options when this gets further.

[zfouts]

Moving to blocked pending further discussion around what our supported distro choices will be long-term.

[plaformsre]

Hi,

I would appreciate more consistency between RStudio 'system requirements' (see link below[1]) and the containerised options of 'rstudio-docker-products' (this GitHub repo). The more consistency there will be, more re-usability there will be for your consumers/customers. Else, we would need to build, test and integrate our own container images from source.

A consolidation of flavours of OS would help. Currently the system requirements seem to be quite 'widely' defined especially within the 'CentOS / RHEL' flavour (e.g. version 7, 8 and hearing even about 9 as a recommendation from within your organisation).

[1] Example system requirements for RStudio Connect:

• source: https://docs.rstudio.com/rsc/requirements

Supported Linux distributions:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8[1](https://docs.rstudio.com/rsc/requirements/#fn:1)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS Linux 7
- Amazon Linux 2
- Ubuntu Linux 18.04, 20.04, and 22.04
- SUSE Linux 15 SP3 / openSUSE 15.3

[zfouts]

@dejangregor hello! Do you have a requirement to use a specific OS/Distro?

We provide the installation packages for each of the above supported Linux distros but there may be cases where we don't provide every OS that we support installing the product as a docker image.

[mbuet2ner]

Hey @colearendt,

Thanks for beeing transparent on the future of the base system(s) and involving the community!

Are there any updates on the subject and if not do you maybe have a rough timeline, when a decision is going to be made?
It would be especially interesting which CentOS sucessor is picked – if any.

Thanks!

[bdeitte]

@mbuet2ner Apologies for our delay here. In general for Posit platform support, we've decided the following, which is what we would do here if we picked something: "There are multiple distribution options, such as Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, which state they are 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL 8. These distributions can be used as long as they stay 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL 8, but we will only test and reproduce issues on RHEL 8. Furthermore, CentOS Stream is not a 1:1 binary-compatible distribution and so is not supported by Posit."

But as you've noticed, we haven't been making any changes here, and I'm not sure exactly when we will add another option. We did have another request for RH8 compatible support in here that came in today, which is what brought me to this issue. We will still considering this and determining when we can fit this in. We do have an issue we are taking on shortly to make clearer where things stand: #508

[JsizzleR]

A premium support customer reported they need RHEL images. Their on-premise setup is RHEL, for their EKS cloud setup they wish to mirror this and stay with RHEL instead of Ubuntu.

Ticket ID 89645