Why Should I Standardize My Operating System?
Red Hat News, Friday, July 21,2023
"Oh wait, no. What operating system am I using again?!" Sound familiar to anyone? As a systems administrator, supporting Windows, Unix and Linux systems wasn't uncommon. Not to mention, I would be faced with running Ubuntu, CentOS Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and those weird appliance distros that loosely represented a distribution.
Then don't get me started on the various major versions that would be in production at any one time!
This problem, even a decade later, is still a very real issue. Distribution sprawl has probably gotten worse. Now we have cloud providers where anyone with a corporate credit card can spin up a system in minutes, anywhere they like, running whatever distribution they want! Add that to the existing sprawl of physical and virtual systems, and you end up with.well, a mess within a mess.