During March, I played around with Alpine Linux on an isolated server to give it a try and see how I could set things up such as Docker and among other things. I did like the first impressions I got, so as of a couple months ago the main server for SudoVanilla made the switch to Alpine Linux.

Let's start the journey!

Small, But Fast!

Alpine Linux is the most lightweight distro I've ever seen, making it the fastest one too. The startup and shutdown are almost instant for me. It's quite a big selling point too of the operating system, as it only needs 128MB of ram at a minimal to run. This helps spare a lot of ram for the main server, which currently has 18GB of usable memory installed. The server's performance has been spot on and doesn't break a sweat.

Thanks to this, the server is now able to handle more load and has allowed me to add more instances to it with Docker. On the topic of that, Docker is a must for what SudoVanilla servers do, it is a goal to mostly containerize everything, including this blog you're reading.

The size of Alpine is also quite small, the ISO file used was only around 220MB, which is outstanding compared to Fedora Server's ISO file being around 2.6GB. This is also why Alpine is usually used as the base of a lot of Docker images, as Alpine's Docker image is stripped down to a little bitty 5MB.

Simple Maintenance, Quite Reliable

When it comes to maintaining an Alpine powered server, there really isn't much to do. Since the switch, I only run the update command, "apk update && apk upgrade", once a month now. The system has been working great for a very extended amount of time, without any frequent manually maintenance and management.

Compared to Fedora, this has been the most stable operating system I've ever ran on the server. Everything is quite robust.

Here to Stay

Alpine Linux is here to stay in the home of SudoVanilla and for all of it's dedicated and virtual servers moving forward.