3 ms·

Honest question: aside from "they provide Enterprise support", does anyone have a reason they would actually use redhat or centos for new servers? Why not use a

Honest question: aside from "they provide Enterprise support", does anyone have a reason they would actually use redhat or centos for new servers? Why not use a Debian-derived one, which seems to both be more common, and have less constant creepy corporate influences?

cpitman 7y ago
Disclaimer, I work for Red Hat. That being said... The big things for our customers isn't just support, it is stability. When you build your systems on RHEL 8 (just released), you will get 10+ years of support and patches for that system. Those changes are all guarenteed to be binary compatible, so the risk of patching ever impacting systems is low. If there is a critical security vulnerability (say Heartbleed in openssl), Red Hat will backport the fix to every supported version of RHEL. That means you get the security fix without (1) having to upgrade the entire openssl dependency and risk breaking something else and (2) without pulling in newer changes that might have their own vulnerabilities. Going along with the stability, vendors can QA their products against RHEL as a known target. Last reason for now, if you are in an industry with any kind of compliance requirements, like FIPS, Red Hat jumps through the hoops to get the certification. That makes RHEL the only option in many environments.
- user5994461 7y ago
  I'd say both stability and update. Debian never upgrades anything (unless security issue). All packages are frozen at the time of the initial major release. Have fun using curl/htop/nginx/libreoffice from 5-10 years ago, plenty of obscure bugs and missing command line flags. RHEL actually maintain their system packages.
jteppinette 7y ago
> which seems to be more common I have exclusively used the Fedora line in enterprise environments (CentOS, OEL, RHEL). The point about long term support is definitely #1.
protomyth 7y ago
We had a vendor that we bought software from require, as part of the software requirements, both Red Hat and Oracle. This is not unique as many small specialized software shops do the same. I still have some government software that requires Windows 2008 and no other version is supported.
lunchables 7y ago
Extremely long life span (10 years), support if you want it, great community, great package manager, and in rhel 8 really great new features like appstream.

cpitman 7y ago

Disclaimer, I work for Red Hat. That being said... The big things for our customers isn't just support, it is stability. When you build your systems on RHEL 8 (just released), you will get 10+ years of support and patches for that system. Those changes are all guarenteed to be binary compatible, so the risk of patching ever impacting systems is low. If there is a critical security vulnerability (say Heartbleed in openssl), Red Hat will backport the fix to every supported version of RHEL. That means you get the security fix without (1) having to upgrade the entire openssl dependency and risk breaking something else and (2) without pulling in newer changes that might have their own vulnerabilities. Going along with the stability, vendors can QA their products against RHEL as a known target. Last reason for now, if you are in an industry with any kind of compliance requirements, like FIPS, Red Hat jumps through the hoops to get the certification. That makes RHEL the only option in many environments.

user5994461 7y ago
I'd say both stability and update. Debian never upgrades anything (unless security issue). All packages are frozen at the time of the initial major release. Have fun using curl/htop/nginx/libreoffice from 5-10 years ago, plenty of obscure bugs and missing command line flags. RHEL actually maintain their system packages.

jteppinette 7y ago

> which seems to be more common I have exclusively used the Fedora line in enterprise environments (CentOS, OEL, RHEL). The point about long term support is definitely #1.

protomyth 7y ago

We had a vendor that we bought software from require, as part of the software requirements, both Red Hat and Oracle. This is not unique as many small specialized software shops do the same. I still have some government software that requires Windows 2008 and no other version is supported.

lunchables 7y ago

Extremely long life span (10 years), support if you want it, great community, great package manager, and in rhel 8 really great new features like appstream.