For my own servers I run Debian, it has a massive ecosystem and is very well documented.

At work it is a mixture of Windows Server 2008 and RedHat 7(.5?). The Windows is because some of the stupid government crap requires it and RedHat because they like wasting money (that OS has caused us so many issues that just do not exist in Debian).

Personally I would rather use Illumos (one of its derivatives to be specific) as it has some of the best code, best uptime, cleanest updating, and Zones are just fantastic, like really, Illumos Zones there is just no match for, they are just fantastic. ^.^

My last gig I used Alpine for all our Elixir/Erlang applications since we were running on a containerized infrastructure, so it was minimal and lightweight. The host machines ran CentOS 7, my current gig is also running on CentOS - not my favorite, but it’s stable and I haven’t really ever had trouble with it, which is pretty much exactly what you want.

+1. That or FreeBSD. Unfortunately I have yet to work at a company that shared that opinion, and I suspect that isn’t going to change any time soon.

FreeBSD 11.0 amd64. with the ability to build custom ports it makes shipping the stack we want super easy. The ports tree includes by default an OTP 19.0, OTP 18.0, and a “latest OTP” by default so keeping both a consistent erlang release as well as keeping OS (particularly OpenSSL) patches up to date is pure cake.

I have found recent linux to be an unmanageable dog’s breakfast of random changes that require continual re-tooling just for the sake of it, and getting patches committed to upstream FreeBSD is reasonably straightforward. I don’t recall ever managing to get through Debian’s arcane processes successfully myself.

I summed this up in 2 posts, one personal and another one on the iwantmyname blog hope its interesting reading. Comments and questions welcomed.