6 ms·

There is nothing to drag. A single server distro is becoming irrelevant as the unit of computation resources is the kubernetes cluster. I.e. all the app see is

There is nothing to drag. A single server distro is becoming irrelevant as the unit of computation resources is the kubernetes cluster. I.e. all the app see is a set of kubernetes nodes, it does not really care what server disto you are running on.

orev 7y ago
You do realize that those containers eventually need to be hosted somewhere, right? That somewhere is a server running an operating system. Containers are more a threat to virtual machine OSes than ones that host containers.
- streetcat1 7y ago
  Right. All I need from a node is the CPU / Memory and a docker daemon. The less I know about an OS or any other services / patches, etc the better. I.e. I want my nodes to be cattles.
  - beagle3 7y ago
    The same mindset would dictate that you only ever buy no-name hardware which is about 30% cheaper than dell/hp for the same performance characteristics... why would anyone do that? And that's why people DO pay for red-hat. Peace of mind, whether supported by evidence or not.
    - streetcat1 7y ago
      So people pay for redhat because they did not move to container/ microservices architecture. Any main stream technology (Mainframe, Dec/Vax, PC, VM) will always have legacy customers. However, one the state of the art architecture is micro services, the optimal runtime is kuberentes. Once everyone is on kubernetes hardware will not matter. Moreover, I would love a cloud based on second hand hardware (which should be much cheaper than 30%).
      - snuxoll 7y ago
        > Moreover, I would love a cloud based on second hand hardware (which should be much cheaper than 30%) I’ve wanted to do this for some time, but there’s a lot of cost involved in the space (square footage itself, electricity, cooling) that you can’t cut just by running older stuff. Bandwidth and storage cost the same regardless as well (don’t buy used disks for anything remotely important).
        mbreese 7y ago
        An even bigger cost is power (if we’re talking about a lot of compute capacity- eg a private cloud). A cluster that’s running older servers might be 30% cheaper to purchase, but it will likely be more power inefficient, which would make it significantly more expensive to actually operate. Depending on your workload, it is often the case that purchasing new (more efficient) hardware can actually be the cheaper option than running on older hardware from an OpEx standpoint.
        snuxoll 7y ago
        This part can vary a lot these days at least, the Ivy/Sandy Bridge xeon chips are still remarkably capable and I can buy a used 11th gen Dell server for a couple hundred dollars. Before the Westmere/Nehalam chips it was a different story, but anything newer is going to sip power and perform well as long as you know you’re not getting “all the perf out of it”. It’s entirely possible to make a business out of this, but you rely on a customer base that’s inherently cheap and fussy by nature. Not all of them are, but most looking “for a deal” are cheapskates who will milk you dry in time/labor if you let them and you don’t have the margins to deal with that bullshit.
      - ineedasername 7y ago
        There's still a very large enterprise market for monolithic software that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. These are not legacy customers.
      - beagle3 7y ago
        What is the hypervisor OS? RedHat certifies hardware so you know your disk controllers and hot-swappable memory and CPU are supported. You CAN use Alpine as the hypervisor, but IBM/RedHat/Oracle customers typically don't.
  - z3t4 7y ago
    What you don't know can't hurt you :P Abstraction layers are good when it feels that way though.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  So why run a full os for container runtime? Wouldn’t a hypervisor be more efficient? What is the point of red hat at that point
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    Doesn’t Red Hat own CoreOS?
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      Oh red hat is the only player in town that can do that? Now you know why IBM bought them!
      - goatinaboat 7y ago
        I can believe that IBM believes that, yes.
- koolba 7y ago
  But the hosts no longer need the full distro stack traditionally provided by a RHEL. Just a thin enough veneer for a container runtime with live kernel updates. Maybe there’s a market for intra container licenses but it’s a harder sell as even there the goal is to go slim.
  - petemc_ 7y ago
    Precisely why Red Hat are moving to CoreOS for openshift.
  - temac 7y ago
    So you remove all the traditional services from the OS "definition", and roll your owns (in one particular context). Don't worry, soon enough some people will be tired of reinventing the wheel each in their own corner, and what you call "a market for intra container licenses" (potentially in the form of free commoditized open-source licensed components -- but that is not really new for that comparison, because truly free open-source distro already exist; you don't have to use RHEL) will exist, simply because it makes absolutely no economical sense that everybody redevelops or even just manages everything all the time.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      "ReDevelOps" is an accurate buzzword for a lot of the market these days.
- bhouston 7y ago
  They are hosted on AWS or GCS on their kubernetes as a service platforms. Of course there is legacy to deal with. And beyond kubernetes you have function as a service.
  - JetSpiegel 7y ago
    So, avoiding sharecropping on the FAANG pastures is "Legacy" now?
pm90 7y ago
Red Hat is more than its products. The engineering talent at the company is astounding. I remain skeptical that they will remain for long though.
- sys_64738 7y ago
  The talented ones usually jump ship sooner than later. Many will be offended to be working for IBM now. Those that remain are the others.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    I had a friend who worked at a startup which was acquired by IBM. They managed to piss everyone off about 6 months after inserting IBM managers. Typical "You're a startup. We're IBM. Our way has stood the test of time, so we'll help you out by implementing it here" stuff. And I don't argue IBM has learned a lot of incredible business and management lessons over the years. But you can't give a perfect playbook to someone of average intelligence, tell them they're the smartest person in the room because of the playbook, then turn them loose with other smart people and expect good things to happen.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  I don't know how it is in the IBM-level sphere for an acquisition like this, but in the financial world there's often a 12 month retention bonus. I'd look for staff hemorrhage in a year.
ryukafalz 7y ago
Red Hat does a lot more than just RHEL. They've got a Kubernetes distribution (OpenShift) and a ton of useful software under their umbrella. (Ceph, GlusterFS, FreeIPA, Ansible... etc)
- streetcat1 7y ago
  So all of those are quite exotic, and thus risky / expensive to support.
  - crumpets 7y ago
    Kubernetes is still quite exotic for 99% of businesses.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    None of those are exotic if you're running on-prem/colo'd workloads. They might be exotic to app develoers but for anyone in operations they're your staple tools. They're the tools used by the people backing your Kube cluster :P IPA/IdM is the gold standard for user management on a fleet of servers. Gluster is the best replicated filesystem hands down and Ceph is the only alternative to expensive SANs that scales well. Ansible is by far the most popular config management tool. Foreman+Candlepin/Satellite is one of the few sane ways to do patch management. There are a lot more things RH has under their belt that I could talk about but I just did the list that was mentioned.
    - streetcat1 7y ago
      I agree, My point here is that I see the acquisition as a result of the market shift that is happening due to the introduction of Kubernetes. And in this case, it was the result of openshift. Note that once you use containers, you decouple your infra tools from the app dev tool.
      - Spivak 7y ago
        Yes but that only changes how you, an app developer, perceive your underlying infrastructure not the tools by which that infrastructure is provisioned and maintained. You can kick the can really far down the road but whether is your ops team, your VPS provider, or a massive cloud someone has to pick it up and they will likely do so using tools developed by Red Hat.
marmaduke 7y ago
> single server distro is becoming irrelevant as the unit of computation resources is the kubernetes cluster In the HN/cloud echo chamber, that might be worth pointing out.
Aloha 7y ago
I think you're living in a different world than I am
JeremyNT 7y ago
IBM is fully aware of this trend, and they're presumably banking on the RHAT enterprise focused k8s distro at least as much as the legacy enterprise Linux distro. It's questionable whether this can save them this late in the game, but there's solid seasoning behind it. IBM had few other ways to remain relevant as even crufty enterprise customers will eventually start move forward with containerization of workloads.

orev 7y ago

You do realize that those containers eventually need to be hosted somewhere, right? That somewhere is a server running an operating system. Containers are more a threat to virtual machine OSes than ones that host containers.

streetcat1 7y ago
Right. All I need from a node is the CPU / Memory and a docker daemon. The less I know about an OS or any other services / patches, etc the better. I.e. I want my nodes to be cattles.
- beagle3 7y ago
  The same mindset would dictate that you only ever buy no-name hardware which is about 30% cheaper than dell/hp for the same performance characteristics... why would anyone do that? And that's why people DO pay for red-hat. Peace of mind, whether supported by evidence or not.
  - streetcat1 7y ago
    So people pay for redhat because they did not move to container/ microservices architecture. Any main stream technology (Mainframe, Dec/Vax, PC, VM) will always have legacy customers. However, one the state of the art architecture is micro services, the optimal runtime is kuberentes. Once everyone is on kubernetes hardware will not matter. Moreover, I would love a cloud based on second hand hardware (which should be much cheaper than 30%).
    - snuxoll 7y ago
      > Moreover, I would love a cloud based on second hand hardware (which should be much cheaper than 30%) I’ve wanted to do this for some time, but there’s a lot of cost involved in the space (square footage itself, electricity, cooling) that you can’t cut just by running older stuff. Bandwidth and storage cost the same regardless as well (don’t buy used disks for anything remotely important).
      - mbreese 7y ago
        An even bigger cost is power (if we’re talking about a lot of compute capacity- eg a private cloud). A cluster that’s running older servers might be 30% cheaper to purchase, but it will likely be more power inefficient, which would make it significantly more expensive to actually operate. Depending on your workload, it is often the case that purchasing new (more efficient) hardware can actually be the cheaper option than running on older hardware from an OpEx standpoint.
        snuxoll 7y ago
        This part can vary a lot these days at least, the Ivy/Sandy Bridge xeon chips are still remarkably capable and I can buy a used 11th gen Dell server for a couple hundred dollars. Before the Westmere/Nehalam chips it was a different story, but anything newer is going to sip power and perform well as long as you know you’re not getting “all the perf out of it”. It’s entirely possible to make a business out of this, but you rely on a customer base that’s inherently cheap and fussy by nature. Not all of them are, but most looking “for a deal” are cheapskates who will milk you dry in time/labor if you let them and you don’t have the margins to deal with that bullshit.
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      There's still a very large enterprise market for monolithic software that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. These are not legacy customers.
    - beagle3 7y ago
      What is the hypervisor OS? RedHat certifies hardware so you know your disk controllers and hot-swappable memory and CPU are supported. You CAN use Alpine as the hypervisor, but IBM/RedHat/Oracle customers typically don't.
- z3t4 7y ago
  What you don't know can't hurt you :P Abstraction layers are good when it feels that way though.
o-__-o 7y ago
So why run a full os for container runtime? Wouldn’t a hypervisor be more efficient? What is the point of red hat at that point
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Doesn’t Red Hat own CoreOS?
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    Oh red hat is the only player in town that can do that? Now you know why IBM bought them!
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
      I can believe that IBM believes that, yes.
koolba 7y ago
But the hosts no longer need the full distro stack traditionally provided by a RHEL. Just a thin enough veneer for a container runtime with live kernel updates. Maybe there’s a market for intra container licenses but it’s a harder sell as even there the goal is to go slim.
- petemc_ 7y ago
  Precisely why Red Hat are moving to CoreOS for openshift.
- temac 7y ago
  So you remove all the traditional services from the OS "definition", and roll your owns (in one particular context). Don't worry, soon enough some people will be tired of reinventing the wheel each in their own corner, and what you call "a market for intra container licenses" (potentially in the form of free commoditized open-source licensed components -- but that is not really new for that comparison, because truly free open-source distro already exist; you don't have to use RHEL) will exist, simply because it makes absolutely no economical sense that everybody redevelops or even just manages everything all the time.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    "ReDevelOps" is an accurate buzzword for a lot of the market these days.
bhouston 7y ago
They are hosted on AWS or GCS on their kubernetes as a service platforms. Of course there is legacy to deal with. And beyond kubernetes you have function as a service.
- JetSpiegel 7y ago
  So, avoiding sharecropping on the FAANG pastures is "Legacy" now?

pm90 7y ago

Red Hat is more than its products. The engineering talent at the company is astounding. I remain skeptical that they will remain for long though.

sys_64738 7y ago
The talented ones usually jump ship sooner than later. Many will be offended to be working for IBM now. Those that remain are the others.
- ethbro 7y ago
  I had a friend who worked at a startup which was acquired by IBM. They managed to piss everyone off about 6 months after inserting IBM managers. Typical "You're a startup. We're IBM. Our way has stood the test of time, so we'll help you out by implementing it here" stuff. And I don't argue IBM has learned a lot of incredible business and management lessons over the years. But you can't give a perfect playbook to someone of average intelligence, tell them they're the smartest person in the room because of the playbook, then turn them loose with other smart people and expect good things to happen.
ineedasername 7y ago
I don't know how it is in the IBM-level sphere for an acquisition like this, but in the financial world there's often a 12 month retention bonus. I'd look for staff hemorrhage in a year.

ryukafalz 7y ago

Red Hat does a lot more than just RHEL. They've got a Kubernetes distribution (OpenShift) and a ton of useful software under their umbrella. (Ceph, GlusterFS, FreeIPA, Ansible... etc)

streetcat1 7y ago
So all of those are quite exotic, and thus risky / expensive to support.
- crumpets 7y ago
  Kubernetes is still quite exotic for 99% of businesses.
- Spivak 7y ago
  None of those are exotic if you're running on-prem/colo'd workloads. They might be exotic to app develoers but for anyone in operations they're your staple tools. They're the tools used by the people backing your Kube cluster :P IPA/IdM is the gold standard for user management on a fleet of servers. Gluster is the best replicated filesystem hands down and Ceph is the only alternative to expensive SANs that scales well. Ansible is by far the most popular config management tool. Foreman+Candlepin/Satellite is one of the few sane ways to do patch management. There are a lot more things RH has under their belt that I could talk about but I just did the list that was mentioned.
  - streetcat1 7y ago
    I agree, My point here is that I see the acquisition as a result of the market shift that is happening due to the introduction of Kubernetes. And in this case, it was the result of openshift. Note that once you use containers, you decouple your infra tools from the app dev tool.
    - Spivak 7y ago
      Yes but that only changes how you, an app developer, perceive your underlying infrastructure not the tools by which that infrastructure is provisioned and maintained. You can kick the can really far down the road but whether is your ops team, your VPS provider, or a massive cloud someone has to pick it up and they will likely do so using tools developed by Red Hat.

marmaduke 7y ago

> single server distro is becoming irrelevant as the unit of computation resources is the kubernetes cluster In the HN/cloud echo chamber, that might be worth pointing out.

Aloha 7y ago

I think you're living in a different world than I am

JeremyNT 7y ago

IBM is fully aware of this trend, and they're presumably banking on the RHAT enterprise focused k8s distro at least as much as the legacy enterprise Linux distro. It's questionable whether this can save them this late in the game, but there's solid seasoning behind it. IBM had few other ways to remain relevant as even crufty enterprise customers will eventually start move forward with containerization of workloads.