The company decided to switch to Ubuntu after using Debian

Jul 17, 2014 07:23 GMT  ·  By

Commercial music streaming service Spotify has announced that it's moving the backend server deployment from Debian to Ubuntu, which totals about 5,000 servers.

If you have never heard of Spotify, it's because it might not be available in your country. The service is slowly expanding all over the globe, but it hasn't reached all the corners yet. Basically, Spotify allows users to listen to any music track they want, as long as they pay a small monthly fee. It has software clients for all the possible platforms and Linux is one of them.

This is not the only service of its kind, but it seems to have gathered the most users. Right now, the company says that it has passed the 100 million users threshold and there is no sign that they are slowing down.

As it was to be expected, all that music and all those users need a very stable backend platform and only Linux is capable of providing it. Until now, Debian has been the distribution of choice, but the company has made the decision of migrating to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and the reason is quite simple: Long Term Support.

The decision to migrate to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was made well before Debian also announced that it planned to switch to an LTS release schedule, but apparently the wheels were already in motion. Also, Canonical has proven its capabilities with LTS releases for some time now and Spotify needs stability.

“A while back we decided to move onto Ubuntu for our backend server deployment. The main reasons for this was a predictable release cycle and long term support by upstream (this decision was made before the announcement that the Debian project commits to long term support as well.) With the release of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS we are now in the process of migrating our ~5000 servers to that distribution,” said Noa Resare, a system engineer from Spotify, in the official Debian mailing list.

This is great news for Canonical because this is a great signal for other companies looking for alternatives and it might encourage more migrations to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Surprisingly, this is not bad news for Debian, at least not in the long run.

The Debian developers are now looking for ways of expanding their team in order to provide a competitive LTS release, and this Spotify migration might prove to be the catalyst.

“This is just a supplementary proof that we have to provide long term support for Debian releases if we want to stay relevant in big deployments. But the task is daunting and it’s difficult to find volunteers to do the job. That’s why I believe that our best answer is to get companies to contribute financially to Debian LTS,” says another Debian developer, Raphael Hertzog.

The transition for the Spotify users should prove to be transparent and harmless and they won't really know what exactly is being used to stream their music.