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Who really uses RedHat? (serious question) ..I haven't used it since the 90's and can't evem begin to grasp why they are such a big player. What does it offer t

Who really uses RedHat? (serious question) ..I haven't used it since the 90's and can't evem begin to grasp why they are such a big player. What does it offer that other distros don't?

killjoywashere 7y ago
The US Government uses a lot of Red Hat. Every thread on every blade of every DoD HPC machine under the HPCMP program. Pretty sure a bunch of the DoE systems as well. I'd look at it as a national security investment: whether you agree with it from a business or engineering perspective, the US Government pretty much runs on contracts with vendors. In that version of reality you need an OS, and ideally you want a US-based OS vendor who will sign an SLA. Ubuntu is in the UK, so enjoys the US-UK special relationship, but still not "made in the USA".
- vesche 7y ago
  This. I bet Government is a large percentage of their entire revenue. SELINUX, STIG profiles come ootb, and if something breaks they have a number to dial.
  - jlgaddis 7y ago
    Yep, there are a bunch of RHAT employees that are "cleared" and work exclusively on/with .gov projects.
izacus 7y ago
Actual long term support and stability. It's used in projects which are meant to work for years (medical, infrastructure, power generation, science) and not on electronics meant to be discarded after two years. I mean, which other distro out there is comparable for these use cases? Even Ubuntu LTS doesn't really fit the bill. The only other OS with long term update commitment is Windows.
- andykx 7y ago
  My professor always called it "3 O long term support" - looong term support
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > The only other OS with long term update commitment is Windows. This is absurd. Here's just one single counterexample - SuSE, which supports for up to thirteen years I believe https://www.suse.com/support/policy/ https://www.suse.com/support/policy/. Is that longer than RedHat at twelve years https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata?
  - 0xEFF 7y ago
    SuSE never took hold in the United States. RedHat did.
    - testrun 7y ago
      The world is bigger than the US.
      - killjoywashere 7y ago
        As a long-time SuSE user, I agree. But the US Government would rather sign an SLA with a US company.
    - pushpop 7y ago
      That doesn’t make the GP point untrue (though they also could have toned their post down and made the same point) As an aside, it’s a pity SLES didn’t gain more traction because it’s a nice alternative to RHEL.
    - mitchty 7y ago
      Not entirely true, I’ve worked at a number of suse only shops in the us. Ostensibly I found their support leagues better than red hat.
TuringNYC 7y ago
Several years ago, when I was CTO of an ML startup, we got slapped on the wrist by NVIDIA -- NVIDIA refused to even service our [very expensive GPU cluster] unless we used Red Hat Linux. Apparently none of the Ubuntu releases were supported distros. So we purchased Red Hat Linux, the exact version NVIDIA mandated for support, and used that, just so we could get a warranty supported machine. I did learn that a whole lot of "scientific computing" happens on Red Hat or CentOS and not debian distros, though I'm not sure why. This was 4yrs ago, perhaps things have changed now.
- izacus 7y ago
  Red Hat (and by extension Centos) is pretty much the only thing I see in larger installations like CERN and other big industry. It's mostly connected to the fact that the distribution has a very long paid support for security patches and other bug fixes without demanding whole distribution upgrades. You don't want your proprietary medical/science software to break on your whole cluster just because you had to upgrade whole Debian to fix a security patch. Red Hat is prepared to maintain their distribution for far longer than pretty much anyone else outside Microsoft.
  - TuringNYC 7y ago
    Yep, I ended up speaking with HPC folks running big NVIDIA GPU rigs at Oak Ridge and they also confirmed, there is no realistic option aside from Red Hat.
- shaklee3 7y ago
  Ubuntu has been officially supported on nvidia GPUs (cuda, really) for over 5 years. What did you need serviced? https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-60 https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-60
  - TuringNYC 7y ago
    So yes, CUDA may have been supported for Ubuntu, but we had a 16x K-80 cluster which apparently needs more hand-holding. There were issues with cards dropping and becoming unavailable during use (turned out it was a slight power-imbalance from the power supply to the cards.) We encountered this within a month of purchase from an NVIDIA-listed Preferred/Authorized Enterprise Reseller. They couldnt fix the issue and escalated it to NVIDIA who promptly yelled at us for even trying to run Ubuntu. They also noted that if there were overheat-related damage they would refuse to honor the warranty. On a side note, apparently they were very upset at the Authorized Reseller and soon that reseller was no longer on the NVIDIA list of Authorized Resellers. On a side note, features like GPU-Direct were not even available on Ubuntu.
romanows 7y ago
Non-IT person here but their security updates seem very nice if you are dealing with systems that store sensitive data?
- nightfly 7y ago
  In my experience, Redhat's security updates are slower than Canonical's most of the time.
  - mbesto 7y ago
    I don't necessarily equate "slower" with "bad" when it comes to any patches. My speculation is that Redhat may more thoroughly test security updates.
    - smcleod 7y ago
      Exactly, I’ve found RedHat (and CentOS)‘s security patching for be very well tested and packages are often provided with far more sane and safer defaults than say Ubuntu. Additionally SELinux with RHEL/CentOS has excellent coverage and tooling, if you want to harden your servers it’s a good platform.
    - MisterOctober 7y ago
      yep -- Centos [which distro I favor for servers] is verrry slow with patches, upgrades, and other additions -- but it is 100% rock solid with no surprises. I use other distros for desktop and various uses, but for servers, I stick with CentOS for stability [or Debian, if CentOS not available]
- einpoklum 7y ago
  Meaningfully better than other distributions?
  - izacus 7y ago
    Meaningfully longer. Ubuntu/Debian will demand you update the whole distribution sooner than Red Hat. And there's not a lot of people insane enough to upgrade full OS on a train, x-ray machine, radiation treatment machine, powerplant control system or particle accelerator every two or three years. Especially if software running on them is proprietary and wasn't certified for new set of dependencies.
einpoklum 7y ago
Unfortunately, Red Hat has a successful "Enterprise Edition" (with its free variant being CentOS). A bunch of companies think that's somehow better to have that than to hire people to support general-use distributions. I've had quite a bit of experience with Debian and Debian-derived distributions, a little experience with CentOS 8. I heavily disapprove of CentOS based on this experience and see it as not just restrictive, but also kind of flaky and shaky.
- technofiend 7y ago
  >A bunch of companies think that's somehow better to have that than to hire people to support general-use distributions. I work for a Fortune 50 and we're one of those companies that made that decision. Having someone to call when things go south is worth every penny. It's not that you can't hire completely competent people to deal with any issue, it's just outsourcing the staffing and expertise needed to do it globally is IMHO cheaper. Even if you have a large company you're still probably gonna have a kernel guy and a filesystem guy and some CEPH guys who are all familiar with the code base. Redhat has a phalanx of people in their employ both contributing code to upstream projects and backporting features to their version of Linux. There's a whole room of kernel guys, filesystem guys, etc, etc, etc. Hiring and keeping that bench of talent happy is someone else's problem when you buy Redhat. >I've had quite a bit of experience with Debian and Debian-derived distributions, a little experience with CentOS 8. I heavily disapprove of CentOS based on this experience and see it as not just restrictive, but also kind of flaky and shaky. CentOS 8 may be "flaky and shaky", dunno... haven't used it. But RHEL 5, 6, and 7 have been rock solid in my experience. If anything Redhat was too conservative and I was delighted to see Redhat adopt a different and much more aggressive patch and update lifecycle for RHEL 8. But moving faster does sometimes break things as the mantra for HN will tell you.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > A bunch of companies think that's somehow better to have that than to hire people to support general-use distributions. Why 'somehow'? Is that not conceivable? How much does a qualified person cost you? Maybe quarter of a million dollars a year or so all-in with salary, stock, benefits, recruitment cost? How many of them do you need to get 24x7 support? Five of them? That's $1.25 million. You can buy a lot of 24-hour support from RedHat for a lot less than that.
PNWChris 7y ago
While I was in undergrad (early 2010s at a major public university) the engineering machines dual-booted Windows and RHEL. We also had servers running RHEL, accessible via VNC and SSH. I liked the setup, it was very reliable and I found it quite productive. IIRC, a place I interned during that time also had some RHEL machines. These days, I have no idea what those places are running.
gitgud 7y ago
Our university used RedHat (2018), I think they used it mainly for the enterprise support...
empath75 7y ago
A support contract.
NikolaNovak 7y ago
Enterprises. We don't consider large-scale boring ol' enterprises much in HN; but I wouldn't be surprised (I have no data one way or another) if boring RHEL instances in boring Enterprise/Government datacentres and clouds doing boring things outnumber shiny linux instances in more glossy usage. What does it offer - support. And support is important when you have something important, when you need to hold somebody accountable, when your core expertise or market value is not patching and fixing your backoffice software yourself, or when you simply need to pass an audit, security policy, regulation, etc. Also, stability. Not in the software/OS stability sense (although it's pretty good there); but in the "I'm going to put RHEL on my roadmap and invest in education and processes and procedures and documentation and ecosystem based around it, because I believe it'll still exist in 10+ years, which is the timespan some of my projects and certainly my company are based on". (Edit - I mean, hell; Enterprises run AIX, which many of you kids will have to Google;). And for what it needs to do AIX is freakin' awesome. And for most other things it's wildly inappropriate and ineffective:)
- acomjean 7y ago
  This. I worked at a defense contractor who was wondering what the next platform was going to be since parisc/hpux was our platform. We were working with red hat and a bunch of us low level code group had a week long class at redhat on Linux kernal internals) it was excellent, and they higher ups got a happy feeling for the support they offered. The project was delayed and I ended up leaving that company. They told us in the class the open secret that centos is basically red hat
- jm4 7y ago
  This is the answer. I run a shop where most systems are on a 1, 3 or 5 year upgrade cycle and all operating systems and applications get security patches within 30 days of release. It’s considered cutting edge in my industry. That includes servers and every last workstation in the place. Hell, even firmware on zero clients gets updated for security fixes. We are doing multiple major upgrades every year and patching the shit out of dozens of applications on over 1000 endpoints on a monthly basis. The applications are more important than the OS. I can’t be in a situation where I’m forced to upgrade or migrate a major system because the operating system no longer receives patches. It screws up everything - and not just my stuff. Users and corporate trainers don’t like unexpected and unnecessary upgrades either. There are distributions I prefer for personal projects that I won’t touch at work. An environment like mine is where Red Hat and Microsoft shine, although Microsoft has been a pain in the ass lately with their cumulative updates and 6 month rolling releases on the desktop.
rurp 7y ago
At work I inherited the job of maintaining several internal web apps that are run on OpenShift and it has not been a good experience at all. These are the smallest and least important servers that I'm responsible for, but have taken by far the most time. To be fair, OpenShift should probably never have been used for these low traffic apps in the first place and I could see it being a good tool for a product that anticipates needing to scale up or down quickly. But for a relatively simple CRUD app with modest traffic I haven't seen any benefit to using OpenShift over a simple Linux server running Apache/Nginx, and it adds a lot of unnecessary complexity.
- dralley 7y ago
  OpenShift is basically Kubernetes LTS edition with some of the sharp edges filed down. It is absolutely overkill for a few small apps, as you said.
- oso2k 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat Consulting as an OpenShift Architect. Be sure to utilize your Support Cases, the OpenShift Users mailing list, your Solutions Architects/Sales Reps to get you connected to people that can help. You're paying for the Support, it's ok to use it. :D Also, if you're struggling with concepts, you can try (https://learn.openshift.com https://learn.openshift.com).
- freedomben 7y ago
  In my experience, OpenShift is awesome, once you know it. Now that I know OpenShift I can deploy a simple app in minutes (as long as the cluster itself is setup), including externally facing routes. It makes standing up new services almost trivial. There are also enormous benefits for performance, security, and scalability of a micro-service ecosystem or SOA. But, there's a lot of abstraction over a traditional server, so for simple cases where you only need one instance it is definitely overkill. If you don't know OpenShift/Kubernetes then that is a lot to learn.
ddavis 7y ago
From personal experience I can say universities and large science collaborations are heavy Red Hat users.
swarnie_ 7y ago
Tier 1 ERP provider - Its Microsoft, Oracle Linus or Redhat. Nothing else is supported.
eyegor 7y ago
I've been to several universities and other research labs with "Linux machines" which were running Redhat.
lapnitnelav 7y ago
Used in finance for sure. And the reason is the extensive (and expensive) paid support. It acts as an insurance for these businesses that are all about risk management.
gravitas 7y ago
In addition to the other comments, Red Hat (and SUSE, Oracle Linux UEK) have cemented partnerships with many hardware providers like Dell, HP, Broadcom, Emulex and similar. New hardware kernel module needs are routinely backported to their production stable kernels (low risk to adopt), and in reverse many of these companies only make tooling which works on these distros. Ubuntu / Debian do not have that kind of support - it's a gamble; Red Hat is not a gamble for the Enterprise, this even extends up the stack into Oracle DBA, SAP Solutions (HANA etc.) and other large Enterprise ecosystems.
bdavis__ 7y ago
RHEL is the only linux on the security approved list. So if you run classified, it is the only game in town. (easy game; if it is on the list you can use it vs. having to justify something else) Not CENTOS, but RHEL. You see, the binary is what is approved, not the source..
dan_quixote 7y ago
Amazon Linux is based on centos/fedora. So, yeah, lots of people use Red Hat even if they don't realize it.
freedomben 7y ago
I work for Red Hat, so am biased but also exposed a lot to customers. A ton of big companies and government use Red Hat. Most of the startup space uses Ubuntu/Debian, but things are changing a bit there. CentOS is starting to get more traction in the startup space. Fedora on the desktop is also one of the top used distros (and Fedora is the upstream of RHEL). What does it offer that other distros don't? Meticulous attention from some of the best linux engineers in the world. Tons of out-of-the-box stuff to make using it easy for non-linux experts. Also guarantees of extremely long-term support, so enterprises can rely on having a supported/patched OS for years and years.
houseofzeus 7y ago
It's interesting that even on an article about a non-Linux Red Hat product, the answers to your question predominately focused on only the Linux part of the picture. From this I take it that most of the folks complaining about what is happening to CloudForms in here at least don't actually know what it is.

Who really uses RedHat? (serious question) ..I haven't used it since the 90's and can't evem begin to grasp why they are such a big player. What does it offer that other distros don't?

killjoywashere 7y ago

The US Government uses a lot of Red Hat. Every thread on every blade of every DoD HPC machine under the HPCMP program. Pretty sure a bunch of the DoE systems as well. I'd look at it as a national security investment: whether you agree with it from a business or engineering perspective, the US Government pretty much runs on contracts with vendors. In that version of reality you need an OS, and ideally you want a US-based OS vendor who will sign an SLA. Ubuntu is in the UK, so enjoys the US-UK special relationship, but still not "made in the USA".

vesche 7y ago
This. I bet Government is a large percentage of their entire revenue. SELINUX, STIG profiles come ootb, and if something breaks they have a number to dial.
- jlgaddis 7y ago
  Yep, there are a bunch of RHAT employees that are "cleared" and work exclusively on/with .gov projects.

izacus 7y ago

Actual long term support and stability. It's used in projects which are meant to work for years (medical, infrastructure, power generation, science) and not on electronics meant to be discarded after two years. I mean, which other distro out there is comparable for these use cases? Even Ubuntu LTS doesn't really fit the bill. The only other OS with long term update commitment is Windows.

andykx 7y ago
My professor always called it "3 O long term support" - looong term support
chrisseaton 7y ago
> The only other OS with long term update commitment is Windows. This is absurd. Here's just one single counterexample - SuSE, which supports for up to thirteen years I believe https://www.suse.com/support/policy/ https://www.suse.com/support/policy/. Is that longer than RedHat at twelve years https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata?
- 0xEFF 7y ago
  SuSE never took hold in the United States. RedHat did.
  - testrun 7y ago
    The world is bigger than the US.
    - killjoywashere 7y ago
      As a long-time SuSE user, I agree. But the US Government would rather sign an SLA with a US company.
  - pushpop 7y ago
    That doesn’t make the GP point untrue (though they also could have toned their post down and made the same point) As an aside, it’s a pity SLES didn’t gain more traction because it’s a nice alternative to RHEL.
  - mitchty 7y ago
    Not entirely true, I’ve worked at a number of suse only shops in the us. Ostensibly I found their support leagues better than red hat.

TuringNYC 7y ago

Several years ago, when I was CTO of an ML startup, we got slapped on the wrist by NVIDIA -- NVIDIA refused to even service our [very expensive GPU cluster] unless we used Red Hat Linux. Apparently none of the Ubuntu releases were supported distros. So we purchased Red Hat Linux, the exact version NVIDIA mandated for support, and used that, just so we could get a warranty supported machine. I did learn that a whole lot of "scientific computing" happens on Red Hat or CentOS and not debian distros, though I'm not sure why. This was 4yrs ago, perhaps things have changed now.

izacus 7y ago
Red Hat (and by extension Centos) is pretty much the only thing I see in larger installations like CERN and other big industry. It's mostly connected to the fact that the distribution has a very long paid support for security patches and other bug fixes without demanding whole distribution upgrades. You don't want your proprietary medical/science software to break on your whole cluster just because you had to upgrade whole Debian to fix a security patch. Red Hat is prepared to maintain their distribution for far longer than pretty much anyone else outside Microsoft.
- TuringNYC 7y ago
  Yep, I ended up speaking with HPC folks running big NVIDIA GPU rigs at Oak Ridge and they also confirmed, there is no realistic option aside from Red Hat.
shaklee3 7y ago
Ubuntu has been officially supported on nvidia GPUs (cuda, really) for over 5 years. What did you need serviced? https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-60 https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-60
- TuringNYC 7y ago
  So yes, CUDA may have been supported for Ubuntu, but we had a 16x K-80 cluster which apparently needs more hand-holding. There were issues with cards dropping and becoming unavailable during use (turned out it was a slight power-imbalance from the power supply to the cards.) We encountered this within a month of purchase from an NVIDIA-listed Preferred/Authorized Enterprise Reseller. They couldnt fix the issue and escalated it to NVIDIA who promptly yelled at us for even trying to run Ubuntu. They also noted that if there were overheat-related damage they would refuse to honor the warranty. On a side note, apparently they were very upset at the Authorized Reseller and soon that reseller was no longer on the NVIDIA list of Authorized Resellers. On a side note, features like GPU-Direct were not even available on Ubuntu.

romanows 7y ago

Non-IT person here but their security updates seem very nice if you are dealing with systems that store sensitive data?

nightfly 7y ago
In my experience, Redhat's security updates are slower than Canonical's most of the time.
- mbesto 7y ago
  I don't necessarily equate "slower" with "bad" when it comes to any patches. My speculation is that Redhat may more thoroughly test security updates.
  - smcleod 7y ago
    Exactly, I’ve found RedHat (and CentOS)‘s security patching for be very well tested and packages are often provided with far more sane and safer defaults than say Ubuntu. Additionally SELinux with RHEL/CentOS has excellent coverage and tooling, if you want to harden your servers it’s a good platform.
  - MisterOctober 7y ago
    yep -- Centos [which distro I favor for servers] is verrry slow with patches, upgrades, and other additions -- but it is 100% rock solid with no surprises. I use other distros for desktop and various uses, but for servers, I stick with CentOS for stability [or Debian, if CentOS not available]
einpoklum 7y ago
Meaningfully better than other distributions?
- izacus 7y ago
  Meaningfully longer. Ubuntu/Debian will demand you update the whole distribution sooner than Red Hat. And there's not a lot of people insane enough to upgrade full OS on a train, x-ray machine, radiation treatment machine, powerplant control system or particle accelerator every two or three years. Especially if software running on them is proprietary and wasn't certified for new set of dependencies.

einpoklum 7y ago

Unfortunately, Red Hat has a successful "Enterprise Edition" (with its free variant being CentOS). A bunch of companies think that's somehow better to have that than to hire people to support general-use distributions. I've had quite a bit of experience with Debian and Debian-derived distributions, a little experience with CentOS 8. I heavily disapprove of CentOS based on this experience and see it as not just restrictive, but also kind of flaky and shaky.

technofiend 7y ago
>A bunch of companies think that's somehow better to have that than to hire people to support general-use distributions. I work for a Fortune 50 and we're one of those companies that made that decision. Having someone to call when things go south is worth every penny. It's not that you can't hire completely competent people to deal with any issue, it's just outsourcing the staffing and expertise needed to do it globally is IMHO cheaper. Even if you have a large company you're still probably gonna have a kernel guy and a filesystem guy and some CEPH guys who are all familiar with the code base. Redhat has a phalanx of people in their employ both contributing code to upstream projects and backporting features to their version of Linux. There's a whole room of kernel guys, filesystem guys, etc, etc, etc. Hiring and keeping that bench of talent happy is someone else's problem when you buy Redhat. >I've had quite a bit of experience with Debian and Debian-derived distributions, a little experience with CentOS 8. I heavily disapprove of CentOS based on this experience and see it as not just restrictive, but also kind of flaky and shaky. CentOS 8 may be "flaky and shaky", dunno... haven't used it. But RHEL 5, 6, and 7 have been rock solid in my experience. If anything Redhat was too conservative and I was delighted to see Redhat adopt a different and much more aggressive patch and update lifecycle for RHEL 8. But moving faster does sometimes break things as the mantra for HN will tell you.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> A bunch of companies think that's somehow better to have that than to hire people to support general-use distributions. Why 'somehow'? Is that not conceivable? How much does a qualified person cost you? Maybe quarter of a million dollars a year or so all-in with salary, stock, benefits, recruitment cost? How many of them do you need to get 24x7 support? Five of them? That's $1.25 million. You can buy a lot of 24-hour support from RedHat for a lot less than that.

PNWChris 7y ago

While I was in undergrad (early 2010s at a major public university) the engineering machines dual-booted Windows and RHEL. We also had servers running RHEL, accessible via VNC and SSH. I liked the setup, it was very reliable and I found it quite productive. IIRC, a place I interned during that time also had some RHEL machines. These days, I have no idea what those places are running.

gitgud 7y ago

Our university used RedHat (2018), I think they used it mainly for the enterprise support...

empath75 7y ago

A support contract.

NikolaNovak 7y ago

Enterprises. We don't consider large-scale boring ol' enterprises much in HN; but I wouldn't be surprised (I have no data one way or another) if boring RHEL instances in boring Enterprise/Government datacentres and clouds doing boring things outnumber shiny linux instances in more glossy usage. What does it offer - support. And support is important when you have something important, when you need to hold somebody accountable, when your core expertise or market value is not patching and fixing your backoffice software yourself, or when you simply need to pass an audit, security policy, regulation, etc. Also, stability. Not in the software/OS stability sense (although it's pretty good there); but in the "I'm going to put RHEL on my roadmap and invest in education and processes and procedures and documentation and ecosystem based around it, because I believe it'll still exist in 10+ years, which is the timespan some of my projects and certainly my company are based on". (Edit - I mean, hell; Enterprises run AIX, which many of you kids will have to Google;). And for what it needs to do AIX is freakin' awesome. And for most other things it's wildly inappropriate and ineffective:)

acomjean 7y ago
This. I worked at a defense contractor who was wondering what the next platform was going to be since parisc/hpux was our platform. We were working with red hat and a bunch of us low level code group had a week long class at redhat on Linux kernal internals) it was excellent, and they higher ups got a happy feeling for the support they offered. The project was delayed and I ended up leaving that company. They told us in the class the open secret that centos is basically red hat
jm4 7y ago
This is the answer. I run a shop where most systems are on a 1, 3 or 5 year upgrade cycle and all operating systems and applications get security patches within 30 days of release. It’s considered cutting edge in my industry. That includes servers and every last workstation in the place. Hell, even firmware on zero clients gets updated for security fixes. We are doing multiple major upgrades every year and patching the shit out of dozens of applications on over 1000 endpoints on a monthly basis. The applications are more important than the OS. I can’t be in a situation where I’m forced to upgrade or migrate a major system because the operating system no longer receives patches. It screws up everything - and not just my stuff. Users and corporate trainers don’t like unexpected and unnecessary upgrades either. There are distributions I prefer for personal projects that I won’t touch at work. An environment like mine is where Red Hat and Microsoft shine, although Microsoft has been a pain in the ass lately with their cumulative updates and 6 month rolling releases on the desktop.

rurp 7y ago

At work I inherited the job of maintaining several internal web apps that are run on OpenShift and it has not been a good experience at all. These are the smallest and least important servers that I'm responsible for, but have taken by far the most time. To be fair, OpenShift should probably never have been used for these low traffic apps in the first place and I could see it being a good tool for a product that anticipates needing to scale up or down quickly. But for a relatively simple CRUD app with modest traffic I haven't seen any benefit to using OpenShift over a simple Linux server running Apache/Nginx, and it adds a lot of unnecessary complexity.

dralley 7y ago
OpenShift is basically Kubernetes LTS edition with some of the sharp edges filed down. It is absolutely overkill for a few small apps, as you said.
oso2k 7y ago
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat Consulting as an OpenShift Architect. Be sure to utilize your Support Cases, the OpenShift Users mailing list, your Solutions Architects/Sales Reps to get you connected to people that can help. You're paying for the Support, it's ok to use it. :D Also, if you're struggling with concepts, you can try (https://learn.openshift.com https://learn.openshift.com).
freedomben 7y ago
In my experience, OpenShift is awesome, once you know it. Now that I know OpenShift I can deploy a simple app in minutes (as long as the cluster itself is setup), including externally facing routes. It makes standing up new services almost trivial. There are also enormous benefits for performance, security, and scalability of a micro-service ecosystem or SOA. But, there's a lot of abstraction over a traditional server, so for simple cases where you only need one instance it is definitely overkill. If you don't know OpenShift/Kubernetes then that is a lot to learn.

ddavis 7y ago

From personal experience I can say universities and large science collaborations are heavy Red Hat users.

swarnie_ 7y ago

Tier 1 ERP provider - Its Microsoft, Oracle Linus or Redhat. Nothing else is supported.

eyegor 7y ago

I've been to several universities and other research labs with "Linux machines" which were running Redhat.

lapnitnelav 7y ago

Used in finance for sure. And the reason is the extensive (and expensive) paid support. It acts as an insurance for these businesses that are all about risk management.

gravitas 7y ago

In addition to the other comments, Red Hat (and SUSE, Oracle Linux UEK) have cemented partnerships with many hardware providers like Dell, HP, Broadcom, Emulex and similar. New hardware kernel module needs are routinely backported to their production stable kernels (low risk to adopt), and in reverse many of these companies only make tooling which works on these distros. Ubuntu / Debian do not have that kind of support - it's a gamble; Red Hat is not a gamble for the Enterprise, this even extends up the stack into Oracle DBA, SAP Solutions (HANA etc.) and other large Enterprise ecosystems.

bdavis__ 7y ago

RHEL is the only linux on the security approved list. So if you run classified, it is the only game in town. (easy game; if it is on the list you can use it vs. having to justify something else) Not CENTOS, but RHEL. You see, the binary is what is approved, not the source..

dan_quixote 7y ago

Amazon Linux is based on centos/fedora. So, yeah, lots of people use Red Hat even if they don't realize it.

freedomben 7y ago

I work for Red Hat, so am biased but also exposed a lot to customers. A ton of big companies and government use Red Hat. Most of the startup space uses Ubuntu/Debian, but things are changing a bit there. CentOS is starting to get more traction in the startup space. Fedora on the desktop is also one of the top used distros (and Fedora is the upstream of RHEL). What does it offer that other distros don't? Meticulous attention from some of the best linux engineers in the world. Tons of out-of-the-box stuff to make using it easy for non-linux experts. Also guarantees of extremely long-term support, so enterprises can rely on having a supported/patched OS for years and years.

houseofzeus 7y ago

It's interesting that even on an article about a non-Linux Red Hat product, the answers to your question predominately focused on only the Linux part of the picture. From this I take it that most of the folks complaining about what is happening to CloudForms in here at least don't actually know what it is.