My personal hunch is that there are probably startups and developers that dumped Cassandra due to "stability issues," which were in reality symptoms of this bug. There's obviously no way of confirming or denying this, so I'll reiterate that it's just a hunch.
Due its short support cycle, Maverick isn't suited for servers.
When you have Linux on your server, you own it. You can do whatever you want. The distro is the beginning of your power, not the end of it. If you're running a Linux server and you currently have the attitude that you are boxed in by your distro I recommend that you immediately dig into the relevant packaging system and learn enough to put your own patch on top of any existing software package, and recreate the package in the relevant manner (new RPMs, new .deb, whatever).
(Yes, there's a cost/benefit tradeoff to each such patch you have to carry on, but there is still economic value merely in having the option.)
That's nonsense. Most EC2 AMIs are linked to the amazon AKIs which are unrelated to whatever distro the AMI contains. Most of my debian instances run on a kernel tagged "fc8xen".
The ability to chainload a self-compiled kernel on EC2 is a relatively recent invention (mid-2010) and I have yet to see a good reason to do that for linux.
The article does unfortunately not mention which AKI(s) are affected, but it seems likely this bug was introduced because someone figured "newer is better" and went with the latest Ubuntu kernel instead of sticking to a proven amazon AKI.
I'm in the process of upgrading all of our instances to Natty from 10.04 or younger. It's actually weird that this issue didn't get any attention whatsoever.
It is a pretty minimalist AMI, which is what we wanted. One caveat: it is in beta.
Ubuntu shouldn't be used for web servers to begin with. You should be using a distribution with a long and thorough stable release cycle with minimal packages, such as Debian.
Server, however, is perfectly appropriate, especially the LTS release (which is supported for five years). Ubuntu LTS will probably actually be supported longer than (for example) Debian Stable.
I've personally found Ubuntu more bare bones out of the box than CentOS.
Debian's primary concern with its release cycle is stability. Other distributions like Ubuntu or CentOS trade a little stability for newer software.
My method: Use Debian but when you must have newer versions just add an unofficial repository to your apt sources (assuming you're prepared to deal with the complexity and inconsistency this might introduce).
I believe that the debian stable release cycle is currently at about 2 years, w/ a very short support cycle afterwards. The LTS cycle is 2 years with a 3 years of additional support afterwards.
