MongoDB on Fedora - Business case for MongoDB support

Ops and Admin Installation & Upgrades
2

Hi @Jack_Woehr,

Major releases in Fedora and similar distros are generally too short-lived for the MongoDB server packaging, testing, and support schedule. For example, the Fedora Release Life Cycle ships a new version about every 6 months with a roughly 13 month maintenance window.

MongoDB ships a major production server release series about once a year followed by 30 months of maintenance and security updates (see: MongoDB Software Support Policies). This release cadence aligns much better with releases that have LTS (Long Term Support) life cycles like RHEL and Ubuntu Server LTS.

LTS releases typically have at least 5 years of full support for maintenance support and often have options to extend support 10+ years from the original release date. Short-lived or continuous releases (eg CentOS Stream) have more frequent changes in kernels and library dependencies that make packaging and testing binary packages much more difficult. The mismatch in lifecycles also means a short-lived O/S release will be unsupported upstream for a good percentage of a MongoDB server release’s support lifecycle.

Since your goal is to optimise costs but support a business case of deploying on RHEL, I recommend choosing one of the freely available RHEL derivatives that closely tracks the upstream Redhat releases.

Fedora development tracks ahead of RHEL and will include newer versions of kernels and libraries that may not be representative of what to expect when you deploy on RHEL.

Before Redhat discontinued stable CentOS releases tracking RHEL, CentOS would have been the recommended path for an open source Linux distro compatible with RHEL. There are several new projects aiming to fill the RHEL-compatible release role, like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux.

However, since it is perhaps easier to change your deployment approach than your preferred O/S there are some other options to consider:

Regards,
Stennie

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