6 ms·

Removing official support for Red Hat enterprise Linux

166 points by petercooper 3y ago

bovermyer 3y ago
Perhaps relevant - how's Ansible doing these days, given that it's a Red Hat tool now?
- SSLy 3y ago
  As slow to execute as ever. Salt was the better future.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    I went with Ansible way back when all these were fairly new, because it was not just possible, but considered "culturally", if you will, normal, in that ecosystem, to run it agentless. Having to run a config agent on the target system always felt like a smell, and begging for trouble. But yaml's friggin' terrible, that's simply true.
    - placatedmayhem 3y ago
      Agreed. Puppet Bolt has been better to me than Ansible, especially around Playbook YAML vs the Puppet DSL. Puppet seemed to fall out of the limelight when Ansible made it big, then Bolt got little love.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
    I find it ok as long as you're using persistent connections (which also significantly reduce connection time for all other SSH sessions). Add something like this to ~/.ssh/config: ControlMaster auto ControlPath ~/.ssh/persist/%r@%h:%p ControlPersist 15m
  - thecosmicfrog 3y ago
    What happened to Salt? I felt like it was everywhere in 2015, but I almost never hear of it anymore. Even their official documentation site has an ad promoting "SaltConf 2021", a conference from nearly two years ago.
- ojhughes 3y ago
  Terraform and Docker have been eating Ansibles lunch for some time now. Even OpenShift stopped using it as an installation method
- jake_morrison 3y ago
  Ansible is still the best for tactical automation tasks. The syntax is also approachable for people who don't use it often, e.g. developers. Ansible has poor performance on larger tasks. Idempotency checks to see whether an action needs to be executed require manual work to set up and time to execute. This also makes it slow to work with cloud resources. I switched to Terraform years ago for low-level resource provisioning and cloud automation. I still occasionally use it in conjunction with Packer to create AMIs. The shift to containerized application deployment makes Ansible much less relevant in general. Dockerfiles are bad at idempotency, but the solution is probably not Ansible.
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    Definitely a fair take; I think Ansible still has a place in containerized environments, but the nice thing is it can play a large or small role depending on how much you want to learn other tools which might be better at a specific automation segment (like Terraform for infra resources).
    - jake_morrison 3y ago
      Thanks for your service supporting the Ansible community. Your books are also great, and I highly recommend them to anyone learning Ansible.
- tetha 3y ago
  We're using it to provision the Vms hosting our container platform besides some terraform/packer for allocating the VMs and such. It works, and doesn't suck much more or less than other configuration systems. A big discussion point internally is just speed at even medium scales. I don't know why something like Mitogen is not built-in, as Mitogen is the difference between 12 - 15 minute runs vs 3 minutes flat, even though it has enough other problems.This is growing into some degree of resentment against the tool in the team. There is some murmuring that puppet might just be better to maintain the solid foundation of a fleet of linux systems, after chef was monetized and such. I'm going to send a colleague the idea of persistent connections to test though.
peoplearepeople 3y ago
This seems like a reasonable position: if you can't test a target, you have to assume you've broken it in the latest change.
- RoyGBivCap 3y ago
  I think more accurately, you can't assume you've broken it, or that it works because you can't test it. It's just an unknown. Which is bad enough, IMHO.
jtokoph 3y ago
I always assumed it was possible to spin up an AWS instance or DO droplet with RHEL and licensing was baked into the hourly rate. Is that not the case?
- jacooper 3y ago
  Yes, he can even use the free RHEL Dev licenses, he just doesnt want to bother with any kind of licensing system.
  - rednerrus 3y ago
    Isn't he trying to make a stand against the silliness that Red Hat is doing?
    - tssva 3y ago
      He is but should be more honest about it instead of claiming that the reason is not being able to test.
      - solarkraft 3y ago
        Not being able to test conveniently is enough of a reason. The guy did free work for their platform.
        tssva 3y ago
        It can still be conveniently tested. He is making a statement and should be more clear that is what is happening here. He didn't do free work for their platform. He did work using their platform which he made freely available to further his own situation. I don't say that in a judgemental way. There is nothing wrong with that, but let's not misrepresent it.
  - monkey26 3y ago
    I do the RedHat side of support for our open source project. And when I do have to spin up real RedHat for something, it’s always a pain of fixing up some licensing or another.
jitl 3y ago
I’ve never heard of the author before so I poked around their GitHub to understand if this is significant. Their account has many repos of Ansible roles, some with hundreds of stars like https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-mysql https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-mysql I’ve never used Ansible, can someone familiar with it tell us if this person is a cornerstone of the ecosystem or something?
- rednerrus 3y ago
  I don't know about now but he used to be. He basically wrote the first handful of Ansible books and maintains a ton of the roles people use.
- jsiepkes 3y ago
  Ironically Ansible (the company) was acquired by RedHat so Ansible is part of RedHat.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Yes, that's the point.
- bovermyer 3y ago
  Jeff is probably the most famous "face" of Ansible, being a prolific contributor and a producer of learning content.
- qmarchi 3y ago
  Jeff is both an open-source contributor, as well as a fairly popular YouTuber[1]. His more popular repositories are more beginner friendly and not supporting RHEL means that it's unlikely that new users may end up choosing it as their Distro-of-choice. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/jeffgeerling https://www.youtube.com/c/jeffgeerling
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    Initially, before 2020, I would often build examples equally for CentOS and Debian (sometimes Ubuntu, if it was a more GUI-heavy thing). After 2020, I slowed introducing CentOS examples, and converted all my CentOS usage to Rocky Linux. At this point, I will not be creating any more examples building on RHEL-like OSes, but I might still maintain some of my examples on Rocky Linux, we'll see.
westurner 3y ago
> For all of my open source projects, effective immediately, I am no longer going to maintain 'official' support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. > I will still support users of CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, and Alma Linux, as I am able to test against those targets. Open Source projects cannot afford to support (post-IBM-acquisition) RedHat RHEL license terms. How does that change developers' (coders, actual merge maintainers) and maybe also influencers' valuation of an acquired Linux distribution (with a new Stream model)?
lmeyerov 3y ago
We always spent a bit of time doing extra infra for the RHEL corner of the world to make lives a bit better for IT teams at our banking & gov customers, and the licensing stuff was weird but ok. But when rhel8 came out with heavy marketing of podman as a docker replacement (compose, ..), despite it not being ready, and then making it hard for rhel8 air gap users to keep using docker vs the incomplete podman stack... we lost a lot of hours for nothing but the leadership's greed. That ended any good will I had left for the broader community. Individuals and bits of tech may be great, but it's against-the-grain as an infrastructure partner. Instead of being proactive, we're much more reactive. We're a small player, but it adds up over time. Ending of an era =/
jzb 3y ago
Totally reasonable reaction. I'm not on the anti-Red Hat bus, I feel like they have every right to walk the path they're walking right now. I don't think Red Hat gets enough credit for its work carrying wood and chopping water to produce RHEL from users who get to sit by the fire and have clean water. Even if that water isn't in the fancy RHEL bottle and they don't get the closest spot to the fire. But other maintainers also get to decide how they react. Geerling is also contributing and if he thinks that Red Hat has gone too far, he doesn't owe anybody contributions either.
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  This doesn't change much IMHO. Already when you report a bug for some years-old piece of software (as is the case for LTS distros), upstream projects will first ask you to reproduce with the latest version or even straight from git master. As far as they are concerned, you are always running the latest upstream release. I also have never seen any project step out of their way and try to reproduce an issue on a specific distribution. That burden is usually on the reporter.
- bamfly 3y ago
  > Geerling is also contributing and if he thinks that Red Hat has gone too far, he doesn't owe anybody contributions either. Like, even if one thinks Red Hat's totally in the right—why volunteer time helping out RHEL, now? Completely rational to stop doing that whether or not one thinks what they're doing is ethically OK. (Other Red Hat software/projects—sure, maybe still makes sense to keep contributing to and supporting those with volunteer time, it's just a whole lot less appealing to do free work for RHEL itself, now)
  - eastbound 3y ago
    > even if one thinks Red Hat's totally in the right—why volunteer time helping out RHEL, now? Because a paid Linux is the correct way to building an incredible seventh wonder of the world. - As opposed to Windows, it’s still open-source. You can recompile it, send it to friends, and more importantly, maintain it if RedHat dies. Linux will stay 70 years while Windows will die with Microsoft. - Linux is truely the most marvellous act of humans. Name another OS which landed on Mars… nevermind took off from Mars. Name another engineering piece on Earth that was the result of the generous contribution of hundreds of thousands of people. Today, RH wants money. It doesn’t remove the other positive aspects of OSS, and it will help build better bigger companies with more marketing power and thus, more weight in this world. Which can also be a good thing. I totally see why, even though a contributor can choose, it’s still worth helping a private company on OSS.
dang 3y ago
Recent and related. Others? Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436786 - June 2023 (383 comments) Impact of RHEL Changes to AlmaLinux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436375 - June 2023 (43 comments) Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 - June 2023 (299 comments) Red Hat Now Limiting RHEL Sources to CentOS Stream - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36419586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36419586 - June 2023 (27 comments)
nolist_policy 3y ago
Interesting how this will turn out in the future. I think longterm, Rocky and Alma Linux will have to switch to the (oh so unstable) CentOS Stream sources. I just don't see anything else feasible for them. In the end their users will run de facto Centos Stream - Just what Redhat intended in the first place! On a serious note, this model will allow users to contribute back more effectively. With the current "bug-for-bug compatible" model this was completely out of the question.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hdaz0017 3y ago
Been using Red Hat (or clones) for 20+ years, the writing was on the wall and still is. Enterprise Linux needs to move on from these cowbots. Now the list of nonsense is too long! at this rate RHEL 9.x won't reach 2025...
- GabrielTFS 3y ago
  What is a "cowbot" ?
  - hdaz0017 3y ago
    cowboys == cowbots... :D

166 points by petercooper 3y ago

bovermyer 3y ago

Perhaps relevant - how's Ansible doing these days, given that it's a Red Hat tool now?

SSLy 3y ago
As slow to execute as ever. Salt was the better future.
- bamfly 3y ago
  I went with Ansible way back when all these were fairly new, because it was not just possible, but considered "culturally", if you will, normal, in that ecosystem, to run it agentless. Having to run a config agent on the target system always felt like a smell, and begging for trouble. But yaml's friggin' terrible, that's simply true.
  - placatedmayhem 3y ago
    Agreed. Puppet Bolt has been better to me than Ansible, especially around Playbook YAML vs the Puppet DSL. Puppet seemed to fall out of the limelight when Ansible made it big, then Bolt got little love.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  I find it ok as long as you're using persistent connections (which also significantly reduce connection time for all other SSH sessions). Add something like this to ~/.ssh/config: ControlMaster auto ControlPath ~/.ssh/persist/%r@%h:%p ControlPersist 15m
- thecosmicfrog 3y ago
  What happened to Salt? I felt like it was everywhere in 2015, but I almost never hear of it anymore. Even their official documentation site has an ad promoting "SaltConf 2021", a conference from nearly two years ago.
ojhughes 3y ago
Terraform and Docker have been eating Ansibles lunch for some time now. Even OpenShift stopped using it as an installation method
jake_morrison 3y ago
Ansible is still the best for tactical automation tasks. The syntax is also approachable for people who don't use it often, e.g. developers. Ansible has poor performance on larger tasks. Idempotency checks to see whether an action needs to be executed require manual work to set up and time to execute. This also makes it slow to work with cloud resources. I switched to Terraform years ago for low-level resource provisioning and cloud automation. I still occasionally use it in conjunction with Packer to create AMIs. The shift to containerized application deployment makes Ansible much less relevant in general. Dockerfiles are bad at idempotency, but the solution is probably not Ansible.
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  Definitely a fair take; I think Ansible still has a place in containerized environments, but the nice thing is it can play a large or small role depending on how much you want to learn other tools which might be better at a specific automation segment (like Terraform for infra resources).
  - jake_morrison 3y ago
    Thanks for your service supporting the Ansible community. Your books are also great, and I highly recommend them to anyone learning Ansible.
tetha 3y ago
We're using it to provision the Vms hosting our container platform besides some terraform/packer for allocating the VMs and such. It works, and doesn't suck much more or less than other configuration systems. A big discussion point internally is just speed at even medium scales. I don't know why something like Mitogen is not built-in, as Mitogen is the difference between 12 - 15 minute runs vs 3 minutes flat, even though it has enough other problems.This is growing into some degree of resentment against the tool in the team. There is some murmuring that puppet might just be better to maintain the solid foundation of a fleet of linux systems, after chef was monetized and such. I'm going to send a colleague the idea of persistent connections to test though.

peoplearepeople 3y ago

This seems like a reasonable position: if you can't test a target, you have to assume you've broken it in the latest change.

RoyGBivCap 3y ago
I think more accurately, you can't assume you've broken it, or that it works because you can't test it. It's just an unknown. Which is bad enough, IMHO.

jtokoph 3y ago

I always assumed it was possible to spin up an AWS instance or DO droplet with RHEL and licensing was baked into the hourly rate. Is that not the case?

jacooper 3y ago
Yes, he can even use the free RHEL Dev licenses, he just doesnt want to bother with any kind of licensing system.
- rednerrus 3y ago
  Isn't he trying to make a stand against the silliness that Red Hat is doing?
  - tssva 3y ago
    He is but should be more honest about it instead of claiming that the reason is not being able to test.
    - solarkraft 3y ago
      Not being able to test conveniently is enough of a reason. The guy did free work for their platform.
      - tssva 3y ago
        It can still be conveniently tested. He is making a statement and should be more clear that is what is happening here. He didn't do free work for their platform. He did work using their platform which he made freely available to further his own situation. I don't say that in a judgemental way. There is nothing wrong with that, but let's not misrepresent it.
- monkey26 3y ago
  I do the RedHat side of support for our open source project. And when I do have to spin up real RedHat for something, it’s always a pain of fixing up some licensing or another.

jitl 3y ago

I’ve never heard of the author before so I poked around their GitHub to understand if this is significant. Their account has many repos of Ansible roles, some with hundreds of stars like https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-mysql https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-mysql I’ve never used Ansible, can someone familiar with it tell us if this person is a cornerstone of the ecosystem or something?

rednerrus 3y ago
I don't know about now but he used to be. He basically wrote the first handful of Ansible books and maintains a ton of the roles people use.
jsiepkes 3y ago
Ironically Ansible (the company) was acquired by RedHat so Ansible is part of RedHat.
- Macha 3y ago
  Yes, that's the point.
bovermyer 3y ago
Jeff is probably the most famous "face" of Ansible, being a prolific contributor and a producer of learning content.
qmarchi 3y ago
Jeff is both an open-source contributor, as well as a fairly popular YouTuber[1]. His more popular repositories are more beginner friendly and not supporting RHEL means that it's unlikely that new users may end up choosing it as their Distro-of-choice. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/jeffgeerling https://www.youtube.com/c/jeffgeerling
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  Initially, before 2020, I would often build examples equally for CentOS and Debian (sometimes Ubuntu, if it was a more GUI-heavy thing). After 2020, I slowed introducing CentOS examples, and converted all my CentOS usage to Rocky Linux. At this point, I will not be creating any more examples building on RHEL-like OSes, but I might still maintain some of my examples on Rocky Linux, we'll see.

westurner 3y ago

> For all of my open source projects, effective immediately, I am no longer going to maintain 'official' support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. > I will still support users of CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, and Alma Linux, as I am able to test against those targets. Open Source projects cannot afford to support (post-IBM-acquisition) RedHat RHEL license terms. How does that change developers' (coders, actual merge maintainers) and maybe also influencers' valuation of an acquired Linux distribution (with a new Stream model)?

lmeyerov 3y ago

We always spent a bit of time doing extra infra for the RHEL corner of the world to make lives a bit better for IT teams at our banking & gov customers, and the licensing stuff was weird but ok. But when rhel8 came out with heavy marketing of podman as a docker replacement (compose, ..), despite it not being ready, and then making it hard for rhel8 air gap users to keep using docker vs the incomplete podman stack... we lost a lot of hours for nothing but the leadership's greed. That ended any good will I had left for the broader community. Individuals and bits of tech may be great, but it's against-the-grain as an infrastructure partner. Instead of being proactive, we're much more reactive. We're a small player, but it adds up over time. Ending of an era =/

jzb 3y ago

Totally reasonable reaction. I'm not on the anti-Red Hat bus, I feel like they have every right to walk the path they're walking right now. I don't think Red Hat gets enough credit for its work carrying wood and chopping water to produce RHEL from users who get to sit by the fire and have clean water. Even if that water isn't in the fancy RHEL bottle and they don't get the closest spot to the fire. But other maintainers also get to decide how they react. Geerling is also contributing and if he thinks that Red Hat has gone too far, he doesn't owe anybody contributions either.

nolist_policy 3y ago
This doesn't change much IMHO. Already when you report a bug for some years-old piece of software (as is the case for LTS distros), upstream projects will first ask you to reproduce with the latest version or even straight from git master. As far as they are concerned, you are always running the latest upstream release. I also have never seen any project step out of their way and try to reproduce an issue on a specific distribution. That burden is usually on the reporter.
bamfly 3y ago
> Geerling is also contributing and if he thinks that Red Hat has gone too far, he doesn't owe anybody contributions either. Like, even if one thinks Red Hat's totally in the right—why volunteer time helping out RHEL, now? Completely rational to stop doing that whether or not one thinks what they're doing is ethically OK. (Other Red Hat software/projects—sure, maybe still makes sense to keep contributing to and supporting those with volunteer time, it's just a whole lot less appealing to do free work for RHEL itself, now)
- eastbound 3y ago
  > even if one thinks Red Hat's totally in the right—why volunteer time helping out RHEL, now? Because a paid Linux is the correct way to building an incredible seventh wonder of the world. - As opposed to Windows, it’s still open-source. You can recompile it, send it to friends, and more importantly, maintain it if RedHat dies. Linux will stay 70 years while Windows will die with Microsoft. - Linux is truely the most marvellous act of humans. Name another OS which landed on Mars… nevermind took off from Mars. Name another engineering piece on Earth that was the result of the generous contribution of hundreds of thousands of people. Today, RH wants money. It doesn’t remove the other positive aspects of OSS, and it will help build better bigger companies with more marketing power and thus, more weight in this world. Which can also be a good thing. I totally see why, even though a contributor can choose, it’s still worth helping a private company on OSS.

dang 3y ago

Recent and related. Others? Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436786 - June 2023 (383 comments) Impact of RHEL Changes to AlmaLinux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436375 - June 2023 (43 comments) Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 - June 2023 (299 comments) Red Hat Now Limiting RHEL Sources to CentOS Stream - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36419586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36419586 - June 2023 (27 comments)

nolist_policy 3y ago

Interesting how this will turn out in the future. I think longterm, Rocky and Alma Linux will have to switch to the (oh so unstable) CentOS Stream sources. I just don't see anything else feasible for them. In the end their users will run de facto Centos Stream - Just what Redhat intended in the first place! On a serious note, this model will allow users to contribute back more effectively. With the current "bug-for-bug compatible" model this was completely out of the question.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hdaz0017 3y ago

Been using Red Hat (or clones) for 20+ years, the writing was on the wall and still is. Enterprise Linux needs to move on from these cowbots. Now the list of nonsense is too long! at this rate RHEL 9.x won't reach 2025...

GabrielTFS 3y ago
What is a "cowbot" ?
- hdaz0017 3y ago
  cowboys == cowbots... :D