6 ms·

I'm curious to see how many companies on here use RedHat for their server infrastructure? What are the benefits and costs?

rubyist5eva 4y ago
Until we moved serverless, we did - business folks wanted someone to blame when sh*t hit the fan, so they felt it was worth it. As a developer, I love working with it. But now nearly everything we deploy is on AWS Fargate and our images are Debian based.
- saralily 4y ago
  Just curious: why did you switch to Debian, especially with RHEL being more or less free for containers?
  - rubyist5eva 4y ago
    A lot of the base images we ended up using are Debian so we just wanted to be consistent, whereas before we were running software from the RHEL repositories.
chucksta 4y ago
The benefit is support and access to their support pages, you can also make general administration easier through some of their tools. But it's pretty expensive
- csdreamer7 4y ago
  What tools? Cockpit?
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  That's why we dropped it. It just got to be too expensive. Yes you got access to their support knowledge base, which was sometimes helpful but if you did a little work you could almost always find the answers elsewhere. The main thing I liked about RHEL was its stability. Not a lot of churn, and for running any other vended software, support for RHEL was never a question. Converted everything to CentOS. When Red Hat killed that distro, that was a bridge-burning event. We use Ubuntu now.
GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
Some software vendors annoyingly require particular distros (like rhel8) to use their support lines
candiddevmike 4y ago
Compared to RHEL alternatives like Alma/Rocky: possibly faster access to patches, support, insights (cloud based analytics and analysis of your workloads/security). Compared to other Linux distros: some COTS software requires RHEL, risk adverse orgs probably need to layer RHEL support with their COTS support contracts to meet SLAs/support requirements.
- vimax 4y ago
  Alma/Rocky are downstream of RHEL. By definition they will never have faster access to patches because they pull them from RHEL.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    I guess you misunderstood the direction of comparison
SSLy 4y ago
We have someone to call who knows how to debug io perf
mistrial9 4y ago
> companies plenty of activity each day that is not in that category
bityard 4y ago
I don't know about "on here" because HN tends towards startups and freelancers, but in the US Enterprise sector, Red Hat is what you buy when you want a vendor-supported Linux in your expensive lights-out datacenters. If you take a look at the Fortune 500, it wouldn't surprise me if Red Hat was in use by at least 490 of them.
- digitallyfree 4y ago
  Yeah it's common in the traditional, established firms. Something about compliance as well as the fact that some of the proprietary enterprise software packages they use only support RHEL.
- ranieuwe 4y ago
  Working for one of the hyperscalers as an architect, this is exactly my finding too. RHEL is the standard, everybody runs it. Exceptions are for SAP (SUSE) and some container workloads. RHEL for all the rest.
rootbear 4y ago
I'm a NASA contractor and until recently we used CentOS a lot. With the changes made to CentOS by Red Hat, we are now moving to RHEL or Ubuntu. The Agency prefers to have an OS with official, paid support. (I do not speak for NASA, my employer, or anyone else, and I'm retiring in two weeks, so there.)
- pacetherace 4y ago
  Hope you enjoy your retirement :-)
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > The Agency prefers to have an OS with official, paid support. How did CentOS fit into that? I guess I would have naively expected you to be on RHEL to begin with.
  - tempnow987 4y ago
    Where I was projects started on CentOS. Often once they got big / went to production, they were switched to RHEL. And devs often used CentOS when playing around (ie, setting up VM's etc at home or just randomly) because you didn't need to talk to anyone to do so.
    - Datagenerator 4y ago
      AlmaLinux with paid support on demand by Cloudlinux?
  - Bedon292 4y ago
    In my experience CentOS basically let you get all the security benefits from RHEL with none of the costs. So it has been popular to minimize budgets.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      Sure, but that's the exact opposite of having paid support, which is why I was confused
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jherskovic 4y ago
We use a TON of RHEL, mostly for their support, but also to have a product that is supported. Helps with audits and compliance. I imagine most big places have similar rationales.
comprev 4y ago
Most places I've worked ran commercially supported Linux on their on-prem production systems, with the "free / community" edition (read: CentOS) on dev/test. Having a support contract in place was often a requirement for the clients, perhaps due to regulatory reasons.
icedchai 4y ago
Many companies are conservative and want a "vendor" for support. Last time I saw RedHat being widely used was at a defense contractor and a state government agency. This was before Ubuntu was popular, in the late 2000's. I never saw this "support" actually used. The benefits are more a CYA thing.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  The thing is not about calling support, but having a contractual agreement so you got somebody to sue in case something goes wrong. That makes lawyers happy. And is useful when offering your own services as you can state that potential liabilities at covered by the vendor. How well that would play out in reality is a different story, but gives people some better rest at night.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Absolutely. That's why I said it was more a CYA thing.
- linuxorbust 4y ago
  It does get used, though. There are some very intractable issues with modern software implementations, especially with OpenShift container storage. Unless you've worked with it tons, it's not exactly something a first-year sysadmin can solve. Personally, I tend towards Debian for infrastructure because while I have experience with RHEL, I prefer the Debian layout, package management, and freely-available help from very knowledgeable people. Not saying that RHEL are pillars of intransigence, they're not, but I've found it easier to solve my own issues. As an almost 3-decade senior sysadmin/devops guy, I know where to go and who to speak with if I run into something really odd. Fortunately, that's rare. Once you've used Linux from a sysadmin POV for a few years, things begin to make sense from a file system, maintenance, and overall "keeping everything alive" approach. I was mentored back in the 90s by a Debian guru at our local LUG. He's since passed into eternity, but much of what he taught me and others still applies. The beauty of POSIX systems. Now... when systemd got released, I didn't know what to make of it, but now after many years, I've gotten used to it. I still prefer the old BSD-style init files and non-binary approach, but what to do with modernity? It will pass you by if you don't embrace it.
chunkyks 4y ago
As someone who does both sysadmin work, and programming/modeling&simulation work, at a significant research nonprofit in the US... RedHat is stable: Which has the benefit that it's stable, and the cost that it's always behind the times. Security is deadly serious, and RedHat make it easy. STIGs are available for RHEL; they're also available for SuSE [very recently] and Ubuntu LTS releases, but we're heavily invested in RHEL infrastructure, training, etc, so switching to Canonical would be expensive and hard. A few years ago I earnestly looked at us coming up to speed on Ubuntu, but with Canonical's recent behaviour around packaging I'm kind of glad we didn't. We rolled with CentOS in a few places for a while [all the benefits of the training and experience], but the recent changes in that make it useless for our needs. I've been around for long enough that I remember when Linux sucked; I started using it around 1997. Nowadays, I find that all modern distros are in the same ballpark of "pretty much work pretty much all the time"; so while I don't love RHEL, it's been a safe stable choice and doesn't bite me in the ass. I think this was linked on HN the other day, and it basically covers anyone using RHEL: https://boringtechnology.club/ https://boringtechnology.club/
- StillBored 4y ago
  I think this was linked on HN the other day, and it basically covers anyone using RHEL: https://boringtechnology.club/ God, I think you can tell the real engineers that have gone through the trial by fire and the ones that haven't simply by how much they agree with that presentation. At some point in your career, at 2AM when your debugging that fantastic new opensource library, for the 10th time, that you rewrote everything because it did exactly what you needed, and made you a hero for a week, you switch from gabbing the latest cool thing to picking those old technologies that everyone knows why they suck. Because knowing why something sucks when you pick it, is more important than knowing why its good. RHEL sucks because in 10 years you will be running some horrendously "outdated" software. Its fantastic because over those 10 years you will have made a pile of money selling your product and adding features rather than spending cycles being an upgrade monkey for things you didn't know you needed until someone sold them to you. And your customers, they don't care what OS your running as long as its reliable. Which is something RH provides in spades.
  - 4y ago
Saint_Genet 4y ago
Don’t exactly run servers, but they’re FIPS certified and they’re the first (often only) distribution hardware vendors support
bluedino 4y ago
Normally it's because the application vendor supports RHEL/CentOS. So that's what you run.

rubyist5eva 4y ago

Until we moved serverless, we did - business folks wanted someone to blame when sh*t hit the fan, so they felt it was worth it. As a developer, I love working with it. But now nearly everything we deploy is on AWS Fargate and our images are Debian based.

saralily 4y ago
Just curious: why did you switch to Debian, especially with RHEL being more or less free for containers?
- rubyist5eva 4y ago
  A lot of the base images we ended up using are Debian so we just wanted to be consistent, whereas before we were running software from the RHEL repositories.

chucksta 4y ago

The benefit is support and access to their support pages, you can also make general administration easier through some of their tools. But it's pretty expensive

csdreamer7 4y ago
What tools? Cockpit?
SoftTalker 4y ago
That's why we dropped it. It just got to be too expensive. Yes you got access to their support knowledge base, which was sometimes helpful but if you did a little work you could almost always find the answers elsewhere. The main thing I liked about RHEL was its stability. Not a lot of churn, and for running any other vended software, support for RHEL was never a question. Converted everything to CentOS. When Red Hat killed that distro, that was a bridge-burning event. We use Ubuntu now.

GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago

Some software vendors annoyingly require particular distros (like rhel8) to use their support lines

candiddevmike 4y ago

Compared to RHEL alternatives like Alma/Rocky: possibly faster access to patches, support, insights (cloud based analytics and analysis of your workloads/security). Compared to other Linux distros: some COTS software requires RHEL, risk adverse orgs probably need to layer RHEL support with their COTS support contracts to meet SLAs/support requirements.

vimax 4y ago
Alma/Rocky are downstream of RHEL. By definition they will never have faster access to patches because they pull them from RHEL.
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  I guess you misunderstood the direction of comparison

SSLy 4y ago

We have someone to call who knows how to debug io perf

mistrial9 4y ago

> companies plenty of activity each day that is not in that category

bityard 4y ago

I don't know about "on here" because HN tends towards startups and freelancers, but in the US Enterprise sector, Red Hat is what you buy when you want a vendor-supported Linux in your expensive lights-out datacenters. If you take a look at the Fortune 500, it wouldn't surprise me if Red Hat was in use by at least 490 of them.

digitallyfree 4y ago
Yeah it's common in the traditional, established firms. Something about compliance as well as the fact that some of the proprietary enterprise software packages they use only support RHEL.
ranieuwe 4y ago
Working for one of the hyperscalers as an architect, this is exactly my finding too. RHEL is the standard, everybody runs it. Exceptions are for SAP (SUSE) and some container workloads. RHEL for all the rest.

rootbear 4y ago

I'm a NASA contractor and until recently we used CentOS a lot. With the changes made to CentOS by Red Hat, we are now moving to RHEL or Ubuntu. The Agency prefers to have an OS with official, paid support. (I do not speak for NASA, my employer, or anyone else, and I'm retiring in two weeks, so there.)

pacetherace 4y ago
Hope you enjoy your retirement :-)
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> The Agency prefers to have an OS with official, paid support. How did CentOS fit into that? I guess I would have naively expected you to be on RHEL to begin with.
- tempnow987 4y ago
  Where I was projects started on CentOS. Often once they got big / went to production, they were switched to RHEL. And devs often used CentOS when playing around (ie, setting up VM's etc at home or just randomly) because you didn't need to talk to anyone to do so.
  - Datagenerator 4y ago
    AlmaLinux with paid support on demand by Cloudlinux?
- Bedon292 4y ago
  In my experience CentOS basically let you get all the security benefits from RHEL with none of the costs. So it has been popular to minimize budgets.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Sure, but that's the exact opposite of having paid support, which is why I was confused

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jherskovic 4y ago

We use a TON of RHEL, mostly for their support, but also to have a product that is supported. Helps with audits and compliance. I imagine most big places have similar rationales.

comprev 4y ago

Most places I've worked ran commercially supported Linux on their on-prem production systems, with the "free / community" edition (read: CentOS) on dev/test. Having a support contract in place was often a requirement for the clients, perhaps due to regulatory reasons.

icedchai 4y ago

Many companies are conservative and want a "vendor" for support. Last time I saw RedHat being widely used was at a defense contractor and a state government agency. This was before Ubuntu was popular, in the late 2000's. I never saw this "support" actually used. The benefits are more a CYA thing.

johannes1234321 4y ago
The thing is not about calling support, but having a contractual agreement so you got somebody to sue in case something goes wrong. That makes lawyers happy. And is useful when offering your own services as you can state that potential liabilities at covered by the vendor. How well that would play out in reality is a different story, but gives people some better rest at night.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Absolutely. That's why I said it was more a CYA thing.
linuxorbust 4y ago
It does get used, though. There are some very intractable issues with modern software implementations, especially with OpenShift container storage. Unless you've worked with it tons, it's not exactly something a first-year sysadmin can solve. Personally, I tend towards Debian for infrastructure because while I have experience with RHEL, I prefer the Debian layout, package management, and freely-available help from very knowledgeable people. Not saying that RHEL are pillars of intransigence, they're not, but I've found it easier to solve my own issues. As an almost 3-decade senior sysadmin/devops guy, I know where to go and who to speak with if I run into something really odd. Fortunately, that's rare. Once you've used Linux from a sysadmin POV for a few years, things begin to make sense from a file system, maintenance, and overall "keeping everything alive" approach. I was mentored back in the 90s by a Debian guru at our local LUG. He's since passed into eternity, but much of what he taught me and others still applies. The beauty of POSIX systems. Now... when systemd got released, I didn't know what to make of it, but now after many years, I've gotten used to it. I still prefer the old BSD-style init files and non-binary approach, but what to do with modernity? It will pass you by if you don't embrace it.

chunkyks 4y ago

As someone who does both sysadmin work, and programming/modeling&simulation work, at a significant research nonprofit in the US... RedHat is stable: Which has the benefit that it's stable, and the cost that it's always behind the times. Security is deadly serious, and RedHat make it easy. STIGs are available for RHEL; they're also available for SuSE [very recently] and Ubuntu LTS releases, but we're heavily invested in RHEL infrastructure, training, etc, so switching to Canonical would be expensive and hard. A few years ago I earnestly looked at us coming up to speed on Ubuntu, but with Canonical's recent behaviour around packaging I'm kind of glad we didn't. We rolled with CentOS in a few places for a while [all the benefits of the training and experience], but the recent changes in that make it useless for our needs. I've been around for long enough that I remember when Linux sucked; I started using it around 1997. Nowadays, I find that all modern distros are in the same ballpark of "pretty much work pretty much all the time"; so while I don't love RHEL, it's been a safe stable choice and doesn't bite me in the ass. I think this was linked on HN the other day, and it basically covers anyone using RHEL: https://boringtechnology.club/ https://boringtechnology.club/

StillBored 4y ago
I think this was linked on HN the other day, and it basically covers anyone using RHEL: https://boringtechnology.club/ God, I think you can tell the real engineers that have gone through the trial by fire and the ones that haven't simply by how much they agree with that presentation. At some point in your career, at 2AM when your debugging that fantastic new opensource library, for the 10th time, that you rewrote everything because it did exactly what you needed, and made you a hero for a week, you switch from gabbing the latest cool thing to picking those old technologies that everyone knows why they suck. Because knowing why something sucks when you pick it, is more important than knowing why its good. RHEL sucks because in 10 years you will be running some horrendously "outdated" software. Its fantastic because over those 10 years you will have made a pile of money selling your product and adding features rather than spending cycles being an upgrade monkey for things you didn't know you needed until someone sold them to you. And your customers, they don't care what OS your running as long as its reliable. Which is something RH provides in spades.
- 4y ago

Saint_Genet 4y ago

Don’t exactly run servers, but they’re FIPS certified and they’re the first (often only) distribution hardware vendors support

bluedino 4y ago

Normally it's because the application vendor supports RHEL/CentOS. So that's what you run.