Alpine Linux In An Infrastructure Crisis With Equinix Metal Sunsetting
Alpine Linux In An Infrastructure Crisis With Equinix Metal Sunsetting
I will just say:
WHAT THE FUCK are we doing? Alpine has been used in Docker, and Docker is now run everywhere.
WHY are these necessary tools underfunded? They barely even need anything. Why do companies not support them?
Can we start giving at least 0.000001% of net profit to the basic tools used? Can we globally force companies to give the smallest pittance to the open-source projects they make trillions off of?
Alpine has been used in Docker, and Docker is now run everywhere
This is exactly what came to my mind while reading through the article.
We underfund our heroes, don't we?
(Also that monitors model name in the thumbnail "UHD 4K 2K" :D
First FreeDesktop and now Alpine damm
Equinix seems to be shutting down their bare metal service in it's entirety. All projects using it will be affected.
yet another reason to back flatpaks and distro-agnostic software packaging. We cant afford to use dozens of build systems to maintain dozens of functionally-identical application repositories
This is such a superficial take.
Flatpaks have their use-case. Alpine has its use-case as a small footprint distro, focused on security. Using flatpaks would nuke that ethos.
Furthermore, they need those servers to build their core and base system packages. There is no distro out there that uses flatpaks or appimages for their CORE.
Any distro needs to build their toolchain, libs and core. Flatpaks are irrelevant to this discussion.
At the risk of repteating myself, flatpaks are irrelevant to Alpine because its a small footprint distro, used alot in container base images, containers use their own packaging!
Furthermore, flatpaks are literal bloat, compared to alpines' apk packages which focus on security and minimalism.
Edit: Flatpak literally uses alpine to build its packages. No alpine, no flatpaks. Period
Flatpaks have their use. This is not that. Check your ignorance.
I know there's limitations to flatpak and other agnostic app bundling systems but there's simply far too many resources invested into repacking the same applications across each distro. These costs wouldnt be so bad if more resources were pooled behind a single repository and build system.
As for using flatpaks at the core of a distro, we know from snaps that it is possible to distribute core OS components/updates via a containerised package format. As far as I know there is no fundamental design flaw that makes flatpak incapable of doing so, rather than the fact it lacks the will of distro maintainers to develop the features in flatpak necessary to support it.
That being said, it's far from my point. Even if Alpine, Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE etc. all used their native package formats for core OS features and utilities, they could all stand to save a LOT in the costs of maintaining superfluous (and often buggy and outdated) software by deferring to flatpak where possible.
There needs to be a final push to flatpak adoption the same way we hovered between wayland and xorg for years until we decided that Wayland was most beneficial to the future of Linux. Of course, this meant addressing the flaws of the project, and fixing a LOT of broken functionality, but we're not closer than ever to dropping xorg.
I'm a fan of flatpaks, so this isn't to negate your argument. Just pointing out that Flathub is also using Equinix.
Interlude: Equinix Metal née Packet has been sponsoring our heavy-lifting servers doing actual building for the past 5 years. Unfortunately, they are shutting down, meaning we need to move out by the end of April 2025.
Pretty sure flatpak uses alpine as a bootstrap... Flatpak, after all, brings along an entire distro to run an app.
I don't think it's a solution for this, it would just mean maintaining many distro-agnostic repos. Forks and alternatives always thrive in the FOSS world.
We have this guy saying we cannot build all the Alpine packages once to share with all Alpine users. Unsustainable!
On the other hand, we have the Gentoo crowd advocating for rebuilding everything from source for every single machine.
In the middle, we have CachyOS building the same x86-64 packages multiple times for machines with tiny differences in the CPU flags they support.
The problem is distribution more than building anyway I would think. You could probably create enough infrastructure to support building Alpine for everybody on the free tier of Oracle Cloud. But you are not going to have enough bandwidth for everybody to download it from there.
But Flatpak does not solve the bandwidth problem any better (it just moves the problem to somebody else).
Then again, there are probably more Apline bits being downloaded from Docker Hub than anywhere else.
Even though I was joking above, I kind of mean it. The article says they have two CI/CD “servers” and one dev box. This is 2025. Those can all be containers or virtual machines. I am not even joking that the free tier of Oracle Cloud ( or wherever ) would do it. To quote the web, “you can run a 4-core, 24GB machine with a 200GB disk 24/7 and it should not cost you anything. Or you can split those limits into 2 or 4 machines if you want.”
For distribution, why not Torrent? Look for somebody to provide “high-performance” servers for downloads I guess but, in the meantime, you really do not need any infrastructure these days just to distribute things like ISO images to people.
There are other costs, too. Someone has to spend a LOT of time maintaining their repos: testing and reviewing each package, responding to bugs caused by each packaging format's choice of dependencies, and doing this for multiple branches of supported distro version! Thats a lot of man hours that could still be used for app distribution, but combined could help make even more robust and secure applications than before.
And, if we're honest, except for a few outliers like Nix, Gentoo, and a few others, there's little functional difference to each package format, which simply came to exist to fill the same need before Linux was big enough to establish a "standard".
Aaaanyway
I do think we could have package formats leveraging torrenting more though. It could make updates a bit harder to distribute quickly in theory but nothing fundamentally out of the realm of possibilities. Many distros even use torrents as their primary form of ISO distribution.
Let the community package it to deb,rpm etc while the devs focus on flatpak/appimage
How are they so small and underfunded? My hobby home servers and internet connection satisfy their simple requirements
Torrent?
That solves the media distribution related storage issue, but not the CI/CD pipeline infra issue.