How to go serverless with cPanel? A bit tired of site migrations after Linux versions hit EOL

[spaceman]

Hi All,

I'm definitely not expecting immediate answers or solutions here... although that would be nice! So this is more of a conversation starter.

Our company has been a cPanel/WHM customer for over 20 years, and we've seen a fair few major Linux kernel versions over that time, including the inevitable EOLs for older versions.

Given that in-place upgrades to major new versions is not a viable option, therefore we're on an endless rinse-and-repeat cycle of

1. Commission new servers.
2. Migrate sites to new servers.
3. Decommission old servers.

Migrating 100s of sites between servers is a non-trivial exercise, especially when the DNS of many of those sites are externally hosted and managed. Non-trivial means time consuming and costly... and hard (but not always impossible) to pass some or all of this cost onto our clients.

It would be brilliant if either:

1. In-place upgrades to new major versions of Linux become possible (I sense that this is unlikely), OR
2. Serverless computing to the rescue? How far are we away (or maybe it's a reality already) of being able to run cPanel/WHM on a serverless platform?

Thoughts, feedback, ideas, welcome.

Thanks,

Ross

 

[quietFinn]

1. In-place upgrades to new major versions of Linux become possible (I sense that this is unlikely), OR

I have slight memory that upgrading from Centos 4 to 5 was possible without reinstalling OS. I think it took couple of hours but still a lot easier.

 

[cPRex]

At this point, I don't have much to add that is helpful, but I agree it would be great if there were tools for this. With Ubuntu coming, maybe that is something that can happen in the future!

 

[SS-Maddy]

@quietFinn, in-place upgrade started only from CentOS 6 only, iirc. But initial upgrades had lots of issues, on of which I remember was the grub2 issues mostly in the EFI based systems.

@spaceman. Interesting idea. But why do you have to go serverless ? As you already know, serverless, does have servers in the backend and making cPanel to deploy as microservices, would be crazy and defeat the purpose. cPanel *may be* working on a centralised management platform, where you can provision and it will go on those servers and migrate the accounts more like we do a live migration of VMs.

Disk - NFS like AWS EFS and Azure File Storage - for /home - does the expansion of disk as you need.
DB - AWS offers RDS serverless, there are other cloud based DBaaS which offers what you want.
Compute / BaseOS - Snapshot migration to a bigger VM may be needed. Not able to think a better solution atm. cPanel related files would need to move to Redis or so, instead of files.

Just my 2c. BTW check out this provider - ComputeStacks - Grow and expand your hosting business by selling Docker containers. It helps in scaling your application while keep the cPanel to manage your site.