Securing more infrastructure by easing OS upgrades

Project Description

No matter what flavor of Linux you use, upgrading production environments (especially between major versions of the OS) is one of the biggest pain points a technologist will face. While these things can be made easier with projects like ELevate, for too long devices have lingered on long-outdated operating systems due to the cost of migrating the content hosted there. 

Our goal with this project is to work together to find ways to identify the barriers to upgrades, decrease the impending doom of those barriers, and increase the security of the infrastructure we all rely on. 

Some ideas we have:

• Work on expanding support for in-place upgrades of enterprise linux distributions through ELevate (ie – expanded repo support, adding CentOS 6 to 7 upgrades, etc).
• Reach deeper into the user space and identify software being used that might hit snags (ie: identify what CMSs are being used).
• Identify the most important drivers to our industries (maybe related to data consistency), and see what upgrades might need to be accommodated.

Target Audience

This project will benefit anyone responsible for infrastructure in which upgrading operating systems is difficult. This includes hosting providers, scientific labs, corporate entities, and much more. 

To participate in this project, enterprise Linux experience, strong documentation knowledge, hosting control panel knowledge, or deep yum knowledge would be a plus!

Hackathon Goals

At the end of this hackathon, we would like to have a clear list of pain points and goals for improving the lives of system administrators and DevOps engineers globally, with at least one presentable proof of concept.