8 ms·

Has Rakuten made a Rocky-er road for Red Hat?

69 points by CrankyBear 4y ago

Proven 4y ago
They can't even correctly spell the name of a CentOS founder (Greg K). FFS people, put some effort in your content.
- aliqot 4y ago
  I have a commonly misspelled name and thank you, yes, this is my number one pet peeve.
jmclnx 4y ago
I want free things to run my 1.6 trillion yen business, boo-hoo :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten Does Rakuten ever give back to to the community ? I doubt it very much, just look at the struggles many open-source communities have with these large companies sucking blood from them over the years (openssh,openssl, ntp...) It is Halloween today, had to get a some kind of spooky over the top reference in :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  Red Hat made a gamble and it may turn out to be a miscalculation. By buying CentOS and leaving it be, they had tighter control over it's release cycle (how fast patches and newer versions were made available etc) as well as metrics on who was using it. Additionally, all of the CentOS users were still "in the Red Hat family" and at least kept the door open for future conversions/sales. They threw that all away now, they don't have any control over these forks and have wasted a lot of goodwill on short term profit. Red Hat should've gone with the Ubuntu model instead and maybe even change to usage based pricing instead of a yearly subscription too, IMO.
  - Kwpolska 4y ago
    > Additionally, all of the CentOS users were still "in the Red Hat family" and at least kept the door open for future conversions/sales. How? When Ubuntu tried advertising Ubuntu Pro via apt-get, everyone was outraged, and rightly so. How else could Red Hat talk to a CentOS user to convince them to pay up?
    - candiddevmike 4y ago
      By providing value beyond just support. Ubuntu does this via Landscape, Red Hat is still trying to figure this out with Insights and the obtuse licensing for Satellite IMO. Packaging software has a high level of effort but really low value in customers eyes due to how many Linux variants are out there (again, IMO), so putting that behind a paywall these days is dumb. Containers exasperate this problem as most folks don't care if RHEL ships with PostgreSQL, they'll just run the Debian-based container. For support, folks need enterprise support contracts. Maybe not everyone, maybe not every system, but folks that need it will pay whatever for it, it's the cost of doing business. Charge accordingly.
      - mroche 4y ago
        > the obtuse licensing for Satellite Out of curiosity, which aspect of the subscription terms do you find obtuse? Simply put, any system managed by Satellite needs to have a Smart Management subscription. You can get these individually, or bundled with a RHEL purchase as the add-on. For consumers of the public cloud marketplace RHEL images, they include the client-side aspect of Smart Management (no Satellite infra, but you can request this) so you don't need extra subscriptions to cover those.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Another mistake Red Hat has made over a long is having a "talk to the hand" attitude about doing anything differently. As an example of the pathology, there is a long standing bug in GTK that causes the positions of things to be off by few pixels if you are running an X server like xming in multiwindow mode. It doesn't sound like much but it can make it impossible to click on menu items for menus at the top of a window. The people involved at Red Hat would say in no uncertain words that they couldn't care less if it worked when you were running a multiwindow X server on Windows -- out of nothing but pure hate for Microsoft and people who use a Microsoft OS.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > Does Rakuten ever give back to to the community ? I mean, they're giving away Rocky for free, so...
  - jacooper 4y ago
    They own rocky ? How?
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      They're listed on https://rockylinux.org/about/ https://rockylinux.org/about/ under "Backed By". They don't have to "own" rocky to contribute. EDIT: Although in hindsight, yes I should have phrased that a little differently.
- fazfq 4y ago
  Sucking blood? How is it sucking blood if I give away my code and others honour my licence and use it.
- hedora 4y ago
  I want corporate open source projects to production-harden their stuff on my OS, so I can force them and their communities to buy licenses from me. They said no. Boo hoo. :-)
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  From the article: > Amin teamed up with one of CentOS’ founders, Greg Kurtzer. Apparently the two have been working together for 13 months to build a real-time kernel to run complex workloads and complies with the Linux open source community.
- fomine3 4y ago
  What Rakuten Mobile do in Japan (not limited to this news) is a bit asshole. This news looks natural as what they do.
_joel 4y ago
Oh my heart bleeds for them
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tkuraku 4y ago
Seems like if you want free. You should use and support Debian.
- IceWreck 4y ago
  I personally use Rocky/Alma over Debian for servers. Nothing beats Red Hat's documentation and its free even without a Red Hat subscription.
  - indigodaddy 4y ago
    A not insignificant portion of resources at access.redhat.com are locked down behind the RH subscription paywall. It’s fairly trivial however to just obtain a free RH subscription via the RH Developer program: https://developers.redhat.com/register/ https://developers.redhat.com/register/
    - mroche 4y ago
      It's a bit of split as to how Red Hat considers the term "documentation". The actual product docs are free to access while the Knowledge Base, which is considered a value-add for customers, does have a lot of its content (usually troubleshooting or specific instructions/guides) behind either a Red Hat login or needing an active subscription. For which, as you mentioned, the Developer Subscription for Individuals qualifies.
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    Maybe a long time ago this was true, but these days Arch has better documentation, IMO
    - IceWreck 4y ago
      First, you won't use arch on production servers. Second what you said is incorrect. Arch Wiki has info on a lot of topics, but mostly for desktop or casual server usecase and certain aspects are completely ignored. Arch's Wiki is excellent but its also about the quality of documentation and how its structured. RHEL's docs are simply unparalleled in the Linux world. I only wish search was better, but if required I can download them and use my own search anyways.
billfruit 4y ago
Obnoxious headline for the article though, why did the writers pick such an unclear headline.
- nagonago 4y ago
  They really wanted to get a Rocky Road pun in somewhere.
Lio 4y ago
I'd not heard of Rocky Linux or CIQ before so I thought I'd check them out. Sadly looking at their corporate About Page[1] tells me nothing about who they are, when they were founded or who their key people are. Instead it's all "Why People Choose CIQ" and "Empowering People" type meaningless marketing fluff and I'm none the wiser. That doesn't fill me with confidence. 1. https://ciq.co/about/ https://ciq.co/about/
- _xnlo 4y ago
  Check out https://rockylinux.org/about/ https://rockylinux.org/about/ Then go to bottom of page there is lots of info and a great FAQ and check out the community.
- hedora 4y ago
  It’s from one of the original CentOS founders. I imagine they want to write “Rocky Linux: Brought to you by CentOS”, but cannot, since they sold the trademark to Red Hat years ago.
- noizejoy 4y ago
  A little further down on that page is a link to a post listing the leadership team including short biographies: https://ciq.co/linux-and-open-source-veterans-sign-on-to-form-ciq-leadership-team/ https://ciq.co/linux-and-open-source-veterans-sign-on-to-for...
solidsnack9000 4y ago
Regarding Rocky Linux, it is "...an open-source enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux®.": https://rockylinux.org https://rockylinux.org The news page goes back about two years: https://rockylinux.org/news/2 https://rockylinux.org/news/2
- pinewurst 4y ago
  "Designed to be" == they recompile RHEL source and sell support - for some level of support - cheaper than RH.
jacooper 4y ago
The article is written weirdly. So Rakuten owns CIQ which created Rocky Linux?
- houseofzeus 4y ago
  Seems more likely Rakuten are paying CIQ for consultancy on their usage of Rocky.
teleforce 4y ago
You know what's better than free? Something that's free and also being used by the majority of industry players. Personally I think this news is a huge one for Linux and RHEL based users community in general. This is the main reason why FSF's GPL is a great license for open source software. According to the article not only the Rocky Linux becomes the natural successor for CentOS, it also added the real-time capability to RHEL based clones, and all it's done with the collaboration with the Linux community. This looks to me like a RHEL distro on steroid and before long there will be tens if not hundreds of books using the Rocky Linux in its title descriptions.
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
I haven't willing used Redhat since they dropped desktop support, and spun out Fedora as a community supported replacement. I had just purchased a boxed copy with a book from best buy, and they let me return it even though it violates their policy against returning open software. I knew the manager that was working and explained open source to her, but I think she just let me slide cause she liked me. I used the money to buy a physical copy of Suse, which came with a bigger book. Suse was my main driver for a few years after that, but I switched to debian when Novell bought them and started causing trouble. I really liked Suse though, Yast was way ahead of it's time. Sorry, that took a bit long to get to the point that these days I only use Redhat because it's the only linux distro available at my job. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Maybe IBM is just realizing no one gets joy from using RedHat anymore, so they might as well squeeze every bit of money out of it before it dies.
- dralley 4y ago
  >> I haven't willing used Redhat since they dropped desktop support, But desktop support still exists? https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-workstation https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-wor...
  - dec0dedab0de 4y ago
    You're right, I should have said home user support. This was before they had RHEL or Fedora. Maybe 2002 or 2003? It was very annoying at the time. I haven't trusted them since.
- fred_is_fred 4y ago
  "explained open source to her, but I think she just let me slide cause she liked me" I think she let you return it because she didn't want to hear anymore about open source.
traceroute66 4y ago
As a concept, I can see the positives in Rocky. As a user, I struggle because of one main reason. The seeming lack of LTS version either currently or planned. I currently am predominantly Debian. Which is inherently LTS, and generally works Just Fine (TM) except when you fall into something where they are a just a bit too cautious (e.g lack of in-house PHP 8 option in the current Debian Bullseye release - nothing in main repo, nothing in backports, you have to go to an external repo). I refuse to use Ubuntu because of their increasingly commercial smell. I tried SUSE but always felt a bit uncomfortable with some of its more exotic sysadmin tendencies. Which kind of leaves me in the market for another LTS platform.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > As a user, I struggle because of one main reason. The seeming lack of LTS version either currently or planned. > I currently am predominantly Debian. Which is inherently LTS In what possible way is Rocky not LTS? Its releases have longer lifespan than Debian, even with Debian LTS releases
  - chungy 4y ago
    Yeah, that. One of the driving points of RHEL (and all the downstreams as a result, like Rocky) is that you get a minimum of 10 years of support for every release.
derkoe 4y ago
Red Hat makes things worse for paying customers to sell more subscriptions which will fail in the end. One example for this is their UBI (universal base image) which should be used to build RHEL containers. The image is "free to use" and therefore they removed lots of packages from the included repos. Many packages cannot be installed - with the current version 9 they removed even more packages. This is really frustrating and time consuming. My recommendation: use Alma or Rocky Linuxes as an alternative
- mekster 4y ago
  Serious question but why aren't people comfortable with CentOS? It wasn't a live or die change but people seemed to have freaked out somehow.
  - jfindley 4y ago
    Because the thing that centos has morphed into isn't terribly useful. It gets most updates early, and as a result has many bugs, which often take a good while to get fixed. However for security issues it's the other way around - RH won't release security fixes into centos until they've rolled out across all their sold products, even long-term maintenance releases of old OSes. This can take weeks. End result: many bugs, often broken, and can be missing security fixes for far longer than any sensible user would be comfortable with. It's a product to make facebook (who are the primary user of it) happy essentially, and very little else.
    - mekster 4y ago
      Do you have references for "many bugs, often broken" or are you exaggerating? You complain about fixes being slow but I don't see they were instant before as a community supported distro.
      - jfindley 4y ago
        My source comes from watching the IRC channels every single day, and seeing what users complain about and how long it takes to get fixed, compared to before the switch to stream. And for important security fixes there's a huge change - I've seen upwards of two weeks for kernel vulns in 8-stream that would have been O(hours) previously.
teepo 4y ago
I kind of feel Rakuten is just moving their problem down the line, or up the stack. Key focus areas in Open RAN is containers now. The commodity hardware at the edge needs to be able to run many of the network functions in containers, and to do that, a service provider is going to need very good k8s orchestration. There are not a ton of "free" options any mobile service provider will choose to manage this at scale.
- houseofzeus 4y ago
  Rakuten bought Robin.io to try and address this, and this is the K8S they will position inside Rakuten Symphony, time will tell how that pays off.
bdcravens 4y ago
TIL Rakuten has a cloud services business, but I'm still not sure what it is. Clicking on one of the pages for Rakuten Symphony (https://symphony.rakuten.com/automation/a-single-platform https://symphony.rakuten.com/automation/a-single-platform) I think I'm even more confused: "A single platform, where all operational data sits powering real-time AI driven feedback loops for continuous workflow improvements. In the platform, automation enablement scales to the size of the wanted business rather than being limited by the operational headcount." I feel like an entire graduating class of MBAs is kept employed just maintaining this page.
- anthomtb 4y ago
  If you are a VP of a mobile operator who has KPI's of "integrate AI", "drive automation", and "stable headcount" then that page pretty much says take-my-money.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  > "A single platform, where all operational data sits powering real-time AI driven feedback loops for continuous workflow improvements. In the platform, automation enablement scales to the size of the wanted business rather than being limited by the operational headcount." Reads as someone shuffled some buzz words and took a random sample. But OK, I guess you can't do anything wrong with this approach in MBA land…
- harpratap 4y ago
  Rakuten's Cloud business (aka Symphony) is made for Telecom Companies wanting to switch away from traditional RAN model to OpenRAN. It's not really a direct competitor to AWS or GCP (although AWS, GCP and Azure seems to be making big progress in getting Telecos to switch their 5G infra to public cloud). Symphony is nothing but a wrapper on top of vendor software from the likes of Mavenir, Nokia, NEC, Altiostar etc. There is not much real engineering done by Rakuten themselves, they just get different vendors under same umbrella and ask them to play nice with each other. Source: Used to work in Rakuten's Cloud divisions
fomine3 4y ago
Replacing RedHat's OpenStack to acquired container platform is one of the reason https://www.lightreading.com/service-provider-cloud/rakuten-is-dumping-red-hats-openstack-for-its-own-cloud-tech/d/d-id/777568 https://www.lightreading.com/service-provider-cloud/rakuten-...

69 points by CrankyBear 4y ago

Proven 4y ago

They can't even correctly spell the name of a CentOS founder (Greg K). FFS people, put some effort in your content.

aliqot 4y ago
I have a commonly misspelled name and thank you, yes, this is my number one pet peeve.

jmclnx 4y ago

I want free things to run my 1.6 trillion yen business, boo-hoo :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten Does Rakuten ever give back to to the community ? I doubt it very much, just look at the struggles many open-source communities have with these large companies sucking blood from them over the years (openssh,openssl, ntp...) It is Halloween today, had to get a some kind of spooky over the top reference in :)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
candiddevmike 4y ago
Red Hat made a gamble and it may turn out to be a miscalculation. By buying CentOS and leaving it be, they had tighter control over it's release cycle (how fast patches and newer versions were made available etc) as well as metrics on who was using it. Additionally, all of the CentOS users were still "in the Red Hat family" and at least kept the door open for future conversions/sales. They threw that all away now, they don't have any control over these forks and have wasted a lot of goodwill on short term profit. Red Hat should've gone with the Ubuntu model instead and maybe even change to usage based pricing instead of a yearly subscription too, IMO.
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  > Additionally, all of the CentOS users were still "in the Red Hat family" and at least kept the door open for future conversions/sales. How? When Ubuntu tried advertising Ubuntu Pro via apt-get, everyone was outraged, and rightly so. How else could Red Hat talk to a CentOS user to convince them to pay up?
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    By providing value beyond just support. Ubuntu does this via Landscape, Red Hat is still trying to figure this out with Insights and the obtuse licensing for Satellite IMO. Packaging software has a high level of effort but really low value in customers eyes due to how many Linux variants are out there (again, IMO), so putting that behind a paywall these days is dumb. Containers exasperate this problem as most folks don't care if RHEL ships with PostgreSQL, they'll just run the Debian-based container. For support, folks need enterprise support contracts. Maybe not everyone, maybe not every system, but folks that need it will pay whatever for it, it's the cost of doing business. Charge accordingly.
    - mroche 4y ago
      > the obtuse licensing for Satellite Out of curiosity, which aspect of the subscription terms do you find obtuse? Simply put, any system managed by Satellite needs to have a Smart Management subscription. You can get these individually, or bundled with a RHEL purchase as the add-on. For consumers of the public cloud marketplace RHEL images, they include the client-side aspect of Smart Management (no Satellite infra, but you can request this) so you don't need extra subscriptions to cover those.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Another mistake Red Hat has made over a long is having a "talk to the hand" attitude about doing anything differently. As an example of the pathology, there is a long standing bug in GTK that causes the positions of things to be off by few pixels if you are running an X server like xming in multiwindow mode. It doesn't sound like much but it can make it impossible to click on menu items for menus at the top of a window. The people involved at Red Hat would say in no uncertain words that they couldn't care less if it worked when you were running a multiwindow X server on Windows -- out of nothing but pure hate for Microsoft and people who use a Microsoft OS.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> Does Rakuten ever give back to to the community ? I mean, they're giving away Rocky for free, so...
- jacooper 4y ago
  They own rocky ? How?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    They're listed on https://rockylinux.org/about/ https://rockylinux.org/about/ under "Backed By". They don't have to "own" rocky to contribute. EDIT: Although in hindsight, yes I should have phrased that a little differently.
fazfq 4y ago
Sucking blood? How is it sucking blood if I give away my code and others honour my licence and use it.
hedora 4y ago
I want corporate open source projects to production-harden their stuff on my OS, so I can force them and their communities to buy licenses from me. They said no. Boo hoo. :-)
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
From the article: > Amin teamed up with one of CentOS’ founders, Greg Kurtzer. Apparently the two have been working together for 13 months to build a real-time kernel to run complex workloads and complies with the Linux open source community.
fomine3 4y ago
What Rakuten Mobile do in Japan (not limited to this news) is a bit asshole. This news looks natural as what they do.

_joel 4y ago

Oh my heart bleeds for them

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tkuraku 4y ago

Seems like if you want free. You should use and support Debian.

IceWreck 4y ago
I personally use Rocky/Alma over Debian for servers. Nothing beats Red Hat's documentation and its free even without a Red Hat subscription.
- indigodaddy 4y ago
  A not insignificant portion of resources at access.redhat.com are locked down behind the RH subscription paywall. It’s fairly trivial however to just obtain a free RH subscription via the RH Developer program: https://developers.redhat.com/register/ https://developers.redhat.com/register/
  - mroche 4y ago
    It's a bit of split as to how Red Hat considers the term "documentation". The actual product docs are free to access while the Knowledge Base, which is considered a value-add for customers, does have a lot of its content (usually troubleshooting or specific instructions/guides) behind either a Red Hat login or needing an active subscription. For which, as you mentioned, the Developer Subscription for Individuals qualifies.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  Maybe a long time ago this was true, but these days Arch has better documentation, IMO
  - IceWreck 4y ago
    First, you won't use arch on production servers. Second what you said is incorrect. Arch Wiki has info on a lot of topics, but mostly for desktop or casual server usecase and certain aspects are completely ignored. Arch's Wiki is excellent but its also about the quality of documentation and how its structured. RHEL's docs are simply unparalleled in the Linux world. I only wish search was better, but if required I can download them and use my own search anyways.

billfruit 4y ago

Obnoxious headline for the article though, why did the writers pick such an unclear headline.

nagonago 4y ago
They really wanted to get a Rocky Road pun in somewhere.

Lio 4y ago

I'd not heard of Rocky Linux or CIQ before so I thought I'd check them out. Sadly looking at their corporate About Page[1] tells me nothing about who they are, when they were founded or who their key people are. Instead it's all "Why People Choose CIQ" and "Empowering People" type meaningless marketing fluff and I'm none the wiser. That doesn't fill me with confidence. 1. https://ciq.co/about/ https://ciq.co/about/

_xnlo 4y ago
Check out https://rockylinux.org/about/ https://rockylinux.org/about/ Then go to bottom of page there is lots of info and a great FAQ and check out the community.
hedora 4y ago
It’s from one of the original CentOS founders. I imagine they want to write “Rocky Linux: Brought to you by CentOS”, but cannot, since they sold the trademark to Red Hat years ago.
noizejoy 4y ago
A little further down on that page is a link to a post listing the leadership team including short biographies: https://ciq.co/linux-and-open-source-veterans-sign-on-to-form-ciq-leadership-team/ https://ciq.co/linux-and-open-source-veterans-sign-on-to-for...

solidsnack9000 4y ago

Regarding Rocky Linux, it is "...an open-source enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux®.": https://rockylinux.org https://rockylinux.org The news page goes back about two years: https://rockylinux.org/news/2 https://rockylinux.org/news/2

pinewurst 4y ago
"Designed to be" == they recompile RHEL source and sell support - for some level of support - cheaper than RH.

jacooper 4y ago

The article is written weirdly. So Rakuten owns CIQ which created Rocky Linux?

houseofzeus 4y ago
Seems more likely Rakuten are paying CIQ for consultancy on their usage of Rocky.

teleforce 4y ago

You know what's better than free? Something that's free and also being used by the majority of industry players. Personally I think this news is a huge one for Linux and RHEL based users community in general. This is the main reason why FSF's GPL is a great license for open source software. According to the article not only the Rocky Linux becomes the natural successor for CentOS, it also added the real-time capability to RHEL based clones, and all it's done with the collaboration with the Linux community. This looks to me like a RHEL distro on steroid and before long there will be tens if not hundreds of books using the Rocky Linux in its title descriptions.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago

I haven't willing used Redhat since they dropped desktop support, and spun out Fedora as a community supported replacement. I had just purchased a boxed copy with a book from best buy, and they let me return it even though it violates their policy against returning open software. I knew the manager that was working and explained open source to her, but I think she just let me slide cause she liked me. I used the money to buy a physical copy of Suse, which came with a bigger book. Suse was my main driver for a few years after that, but I switched to debian when Novell bought them and started causing trouble. I really liked Suse though, Yast was way ahead of it's time. Sorry, that took a bit long to get to the point that these days I only use Redhat because it's the only linux distro available at my job. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Maybe IBM is just realizing no one gets joy from using RedHat anymore, so they might as well squeeze every bit of money out of it before it dies.

dralley 4y ago
>> I haven't willing used Redhat since they dropped desktop support, But desktop support still exists? https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-workstation https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-wor...
- dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  You're right, I should have said home user support. This was before they had RHEL or Fedora. Maybe 2002 or 2003? It was very annoying at the time. I haven't trusted them since.
fred_is_fred 4y ago
"explained open source to her, but I think she just let me slide cause she liked me" I think she let you return it because she didn't want to hear anymore about open source.

traceroute66 4y ago

As a concept, I can see the positives in Rocky. As a user, I struggle because of one main reason. The seeming lack of LTS version either currently or planned. I currently am predominantly Debian. Which is inherently LTS, and generally works Just Fine (TM) except when you fall into something where they are a just a bit too cautious (e.g lack of in-house PHP 8 option in the current Debian Bullseye release - nothing in main repo, nothing in backports, you have to go to an external repo). I refuse to use Ubuntu because of their increasingly commercial smell. I tried SUSE but always felt a bit uncomfortable with some of its more exotic sysadmin tendencies. Which kind of leaves me in the market for another LTS platform.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> As a user, I struggle because of one main reason. The seeming lack of LTS version either currently or planned. > I currently am predominantly Debian. Which is inherently LTS In what possible way is Rocky not LTS? Its releases have longer lifespan than Debian, even with Debian LTS releases
- chungy 4y ago
  Yeah, that. One of the driving points of RHEL (and all the downstreams as a result, like Rocky) is that you get a minimum of 10 years of support for every release.

derkoe 4y ago

Red Hat makes things worse for paying customers to sell more subscriptions which will fail in the end. One example for this is their UBI (universal base image) which should be used to build RHEL containers. The image is "free to use" and therefore they removed lots of packages from the included repos. Many packages cannot be installed - with the current version 9 they removed even more packages. This is really frustrating and time consuming. My recommendation: use Alma or Rocky Linuxes as an alternative

mekster 4y ago
Serious question but why aren't people comfortable with CentOS? It wasn't a live or die change but people seemed to have freaked out somehow.
- jfindley 4y ago
  Because the thing that centos has morphed into isn't terribly useful. It gets most updates early, and as a result has many bugs, which often take a good while to get fixed. However for security issues it's the other way around - RH won't release security fixes into centos until they've rolled out across all their sold products, even long-term maintenance releases of old OSes. This can take weeks. End result: many bugs, often broken, and can be missing security fixes for far longer than any sensible user would be comfortable with. It's a product to make facebook (who are the primary user of it) happy essentially, and very little else.
  - mekster 4y ago
    Do you have references for "many bugs, often broken" or are you exaggerating? You complain about fixes being slow but I don't see they were instant before as a community supported distro.
    - jfindley 4y ago
      My source comes from watching the IRC channels every single day, and seeing what users complain about and how long it takes to get fixed, compared to before the switch to stream. And for important security fixes there's a huge change - I've seen upwards of two weeks for kernel vulns in 8-stream that would have been O(hours) previously.

teepo 4y ago

I kind of feel Rakuten is just moving their problem down the line, or up the stack. Key focus areas in Open RAN is containers now. The commodity hardware at the edge needs to be able to run many of the network functions in containers, and to do that, a service provider is going to need very good k8s orchestration. There are not a ton of "free" options any mobile service provider will choose to manage this at scale.

houseofzeus 4y ago
Rakuten bought Robin.io to try and address this, and this is the K8S they will position inside Rakuten Symphony, time will tell how that pays off.

bdcravens 4y ago

TIL Rakuten has a cloud services business, but I'm still not sure what it is. Clicking on one of the pages for Rakuten Symphony (https://symphony.rakuten.com/automation/a-single-platform https://symphony.rakuten.com/automation/a-single-platform) I think I'm even more confused: "A single platform, where all operational data sits powering real-time AI driven feedback loops for continuous workflow improvements. In the platform, automation enablement scales to the size of the wanted business rather than being limited by the operational headcount." I feel like an entire graduating class of MBAs is kept employed just maintaining this page.

anthomtb 4y ago
If you are a VP of a mobile operator who has KPI's of "integrate AI", "drive automation", and "stable headcount" then that page pretty much says take-my-money.
still_grokking 4y ago
> "A single platform, where all operational data sits powering real-time AI driven feedback loops for continuous workflow improvements. In the platform, automation enablement scales to the size of the wanted business rather than being limited by the operational headcount." Reads as someone shuffled some buzz words and took a random sample. But OK, I guess you can't do anything wrong with this approach in MBA land…
harpratap 4y ago
Rakuten's Cloud business (aka Symphony) is made for Telecom Companies wanting to switch away from traditional RAN model to OpenRAN. It's not really a direct competitor to AWS or GCP (although AWS, GCP and Azure seems to be making big progress in getting Telecos to switch their 5G infra to public cloud). Symphony is nothing but a wrapper on top of vendor software from the likes of Mavenir, Nokia, NEC, Altiostar etc. There is not much real engineering done by Rakuten themselves, they just get different vendors under same umbrella and ask them to play nice with each other. Source: Used to work in Rakuten's Cloud divisions

fomine3 4y ago

Replacing RedHat's OpenStack to acquired container platform is one of the reason https://www.lightreading.com/service-provider-cloud/rakuten-is-dumping-red-hats-openstack-for-its-own-cloud-tech/d/d-id/777568 https://www.lightreading.com/service-provider-cloud/rakuten-...