Most modern Linux distros use systemd now, which is a pretty good unified platform for starting services.
I don't quite understand the other points; you can certainly develop on Linux and there are lots of mature monitoring options.
The trick with auto-updates is, you're getting everything from the package manager. This forces you to keep everything up to date, not just some notion of the 'core system', which is what you're getting from Mac update. Of course, you have to have some discipline and stage major updates in a testing area before you actually update production servers, but I think you'll find key packages like OpenSSL should probably be kept up-to-date.
Personally, I maintain a system which consists of about 30 CentOS servers; not large by any means. But things like upgrades and monitoring are a non-issue; we test updates before we apply them, and we use Nagios for monitoring.
As someone downthread pointed out, you can get a SuperMicro 1U server with a hell of a lot more horsepower than a Mac Mini for an equivalent price; the motivation for Mac servers seems to be almost exclusively to test and build Mac-specific software. I'd be curious to know what your specific application is that motivates this?
I don't quite understand the other points; you can certainly develop on Linux and there are lots of mature monitoring options.
The trick with auto-updates is, you're getting everything from the package manager. This forces you to keep everything up to date, not just some notion of the 'core system', which is what you're getting from Mac update. Of course, you have to have some discipline and stage major updates in a testing area before you actually update production servers, but I think you'll find key packages like OpenSSL should probably be kept up-to-date.
Personally, I maintain a system which consists of about 30 CentOS servers; not large by any means. But things like upgrades and monitoring are a non-issue; we test updates before we apply them, and we use Nagios for monitoring.
As someone downthread pointed out, you can get a SuperMicro 1U server with a hell of a lot more horsepower than a Mac Mini for an equivalent price; the motivation for Mac servers seems to be almost exclusively to test and build Mac-specific software. I'd be curious to know what your specific application is that motivates this?