Goodbye, CoreOS

For my now-retired at-home hosting, and for my first migration to the cloud, I used CoreOS as my hosting OS. It\’s optimized to be a container server and for super-efficient automated deployments. It worked well, and I loved the elegance behind the design, even though I never did multi-node automated CI/CD deployments with it. I had had a problem with it since the cloud migration, where every 11 days after reboot, it would spike CPU and memory and get unresponsive for a few minutes at a time. I could never entirely nail down what was causing it, but best I can tell, logging was getting sticky trying to log failed login attempts from SSH. That I had MariaDB/MySQL, a couple of low-activity wordpress sites, and automated Let\’sEncrypt cert management running in 2G of memory wasn\’t helping either.

Since I built that version 8mos or so ago, the CoreOS people, since acquired by RedHat, announced upcoming the end-of-life of CoreOS on 26MAY2020. That, combined with my ongoing minor problems led me to port everything to a new cloud host.

This time I went with a more conventional linux, and ported everything over in a few hours, along with DR / rebuild documentation. In fact, this post is the first on the new platform. Here\’s hope it\’s happily running in 12 days, and thanks for your service CoreOS.