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Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

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Re: Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

#21

Post by harryf »

hinkley wrote: post #13
watwut wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The burning desire to build from scratch is simply because it is easier and because it tend to be more verbally valued by management then working on older product which tend to be snarked at as merely maintennance. The moment management praise also people working on less new and gives them appropriate salaries and autonomy, burning desire changes - except in few people who are truly naturally like that. It is win win…

I'm starting to have doubts about this line of reasoning. It just doesn't explain enough of the risky behavior I see. I'm starting to think it might be the same thing that gets young developers to put up with 10+ hour days. That feeling you get when you lose yourself in a problem for hours and hours. Being in a Flow state is seductive. Nobody gets that feeling when looking through the bug database or knowledge base,…

Programming is based on hero worship. Anyone who makes even half an effort to better themselves as a software developer will encounter famous names from the past - those that "made a difference" by creating languages, operating systems and algorithms. Keyword here is "create". This is not an industry that celebrates maintence programmers. There's no glory for the guy that spent 20 years keeping the system that your banking transactions depend upon.

So naturally young programmers will see to be the next Richie, Torvalds or Knuth and to do that you gotta create something new. Gotta change the world

Re: Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

#22

Post by smarterclayton »

breser wrote: post #18
yeukhon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is important to note OpenShift predated Kubernetes. RH reimplemented the underlying platform by adopting Kubernetes only a few years ago.

That is a fair point. I'm only talking about the "Kubernetes" implementation within OpenShift. It's modified from the upstream one and includes things that aren't part of upstream Kubernetes.

Routes were created about a year before ingress.

Part of what we do is give users a path of adoption. For instance, routes will continue to work forever. The openshift routers have almost every bell and whistle possible for routes - and we've recently added ingress support. We also took all of the security features of routes and applied them to ingress - for example, if two different namespaces ask for the same hostname with a route, the oldest one always gets served. We also adapted the security rbac around routes to ingress, so you can set a role that controls whether end users can use custom host names or custom certs. We also are in the process of adding all of our extended cert validation to the router for both routes and ingress, so if a user puts in a bad cert other users aren't impacted.

Basically, you can use vanilla Kubernetes if you want. But openshift is a sundae with sprinkles. Come for the ice cream, stay for the toppings?

Edit: also, every add on in openshift is either something that will eventually be in Kube, or an extension to Kube. Red Hatters are the ones who added extensibility to Kube (with help from others) like api extensions, CRD, initializers, web hook extensions, binary CLI plugins. We did that so that OpenShift can extend Kube to solve real user problems, and also so that everyone else in the ecosystem can do the same.

Re: Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

#23

Post by jamespo »

breser wrote: post #8
wstrange wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that OpenShift is more of a superset of k8s vs. a fork. I don't think the situation is going to be as bad as you are implying.

A fork can imply many things, but all supersets are forks. I realize that RedHat doesn't like calling OpenShift a fork, but it fundamentally is. The only people that will maintain their additional functionality is RedHat themselves. If you manage to avoid all of their added functionality then you can avoid the vendor lock in. But you can't avoid the delays in getting upstream features/bug fixes. If Kubernetes was sup…

They do have the clout to get their improvements upstream

http://stackalytics.com/?project_type=kubernetes-group&metri...

Re: Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

#24

Post by Avshalom »

dasil003 wrote: post #15
Avshalom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is some people want super stable, improvements are great but the ability to plan is also great. That breaking change that prevents Redhat from integrating Kubernetes into Openshift is just as likely to be a breaking change for Company X using Kubernetes That's why they pay Redhat, so they can plan.

You're sort of twisting GP's point by saying that because K8s is not super stable, Red Hat will provide stability via OpenShift. I mean yes, Red Hat will certainly provide a more stable version, but it's a double-edged sword, because K8s might leave OpenShift in the dust with some incompatible change, and then a few years down the line you could end up with serious buyer's remorse when K8s is an order of magnitude be…

You could equally end up a few years down the line with Kubernetes being an order of magnitude better but also having required two orders of magnitude of work (over those years) porting your companies infrastructure to it.

or a few years down the line the zeitgeist has moved to Locutus and no one but Red Hat is driving anymore.

Re: Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

#25

Post by smarterclayton »

dasil003 wrote: post #15
Avshalom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is some people want super stable, improvements are great but the ability to plan is also great. That breaking change that prevents Redhat from integrating Kubernetes into Openshift is just as likely to be a breaking change for Company X using Kubernetes That's why they pay Redhat, so they can plan.

You're sort of twisting GP's point by saying that because K8s is not super stable, Red Hat will provide stability via OpenShift. I mean yes, Red Hat will certainly provide a more stable version, but it's a double-edged sword, because K8s might leave OpenShift in the dust with some incompatible change, and then a few years down the line you could end up with serious buyer's remorse when K8s is an order of magnitude be…

I can assure you that openshift will always be Kube++. It's just a Kube distro. The fact that today you need to compile in those extensions is a detail that we and others spend most of the time addressing.

Odds are, most of the things you use in Kubernetes were because someone working on OpenShift wrote, tested, performance tested, and stress tested in production.

When LTS OpenShift is a thing, there will still be an OpenShift trucking along right behind the latest Kube. We always try to strike the balance between being on the bleeding edge and making sure end user clusters continue to work. In fact, a lot of the bugs in patch releases are found by the teams working on openshift and opened upstream right away. But an OpenShift user never sees that, because we only ship once it's stable.

Re: Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

#26

Post by smarterclayton »

StillBored wrote: post #19
throw2016 wrote: post #6

Redhat might be doing well but many open source projects clearly aren't. There are routine SOS posted here about projects in dire straits. So how much of this revenue does downstream see? Something as critical as Gnupg was recently in trouble and got funding from Stripe and Facebook. Companies like Redhat acquire projects or hire project leads for influence but few really seem to 'support' open source. Docker is a VC…

Redhat supports the community by providing tons of maintainers/maintenance of projects. So, they may not support $PROJECT with dollars, but for a few thousand projects they base their business on, they provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in year in engineering time fixing bugs, or updating things which are bothering their customers. Particularly on all the unsexy portions of the OS that everyone else has moved o…

Who do you think maintains overlayfs and user namespaces for containers?

Red Hat :)

Re: Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

#27

Post by Avshalom »

StillBored wrote: post #3

I've been hearing the "boring" comment a lot lately, and I totally agree. I don't want the exciting filesystem (btrfs which just took me for a ride), or the exciting programming language/library that will strand me in 6 months with multiple man-years of work. No, what I want is boring. That means everything works as I expect it too, and it doesn't create drama every few months when the cool kids decide that the old w…

I've said it before but basically every other post on HN makes me want to learn Ada out of spite.

Re: Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

#28

Post by smarterclayton »

breser wrote: post #5

OpenShift is a fork of Kubernetes. Case in point. OpenShift has functionality called a Route. That isn't in Kubernetes. Kubernetes of course went and added something similar called ingress. This means that anytime Kubernetes does a release that RedHat has to manage merging all those changes in with their local changes that aren't part of their project. This is exactly the same sort of thing that RedHat does with thei…

> The fact that RedHat has failed to get their modifications integrated upstream and have to maintain themselves is a massive failure on their part.

Not really correct. We treated ingress as routes v2. Some of the design choices for ingress (which is still beta, and may change again before reaching stable) were improvements, but others created more problems.

RBAC, most of the authentication code, a huge amount of performance work, podsecuritypolicy, egress network policy, and many others all originated in OpenShift, and then we moved or helped move them into Kube. When we did that, we worked in the community to improve those features. And then we do all the work in OpenShift to make them transparently (mostly) available to the early adopters. For instance, OpenShift RBAC APIs in 3.7 now sit on top of Kube RBAC, and you can use either API. We'll continue supporting that for a long time so that users can switch at their leisure.

It's just what we do.

Edit: templates are the only thing that didn't get upstream, and it was because Helm was good enough at that point that we didn't need it in Kube. We continue to support templates, and they are exposed under the new service catalog work as a broker so users can be completely oblivious to their consumption like we're hoping to do for Helm. Everyone wins.

Edit2: deployment configs also are an example of predating Kube deployments - the fundamental design choice is actually different (DC can fail and inform you something is wrong, deployments just try forever). We continue to add capability to deployments to make them better than DCs, and then add the same improvements to DCs. If we picked a new name it would be DeploymentJob - it can run hooks, have custom logic, and fail. It's not upstream, but will be an extension API soon.

Re: Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

#29

Post by snaky »

organsnyder wrote: post #2

My company (20,000+ employees) just started an engagement with Red Hat this week. We went with them for exactly what the article describes: open source software, packaged in an enterprise (i.e. expensive) fashion to make it palatable. We could have implemented these tools ourselves, but the executives appreciate the support contract and training, and I'm already seeing how we can benefit from the consultants' knowled…

That's funny how things are done in big shops. It's pretty much okay to spend a good six digit sum for some tool done by 3rd party, but just impossible to pay 100x less to someone in-house who could add a couple of features into existing in-house software on a weekend.

Re: Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

#30

Post by nvarsj »

breser wrote: post #5

OpenShift is a fork of Kubernetes. Case in point. OpenShift has functionality called a Route. That isn't in Kubernetes. Kubernetes of course went and added something similar called ingress. This means that anytime Kubernetes does a release that RedHat has to manage merging all those changes in with their local changes that aren't part of their project. This is exactly the same sort of thing that RedHat does with thei…

Kubernetes owes its success largely to Openshift and Redhat's efforts. Without Openshift, Kubernetes would just be an interesting POC. Google doesn't dog food Kubernetes. Openshift has since the beginning, and contributed significantly to K8s as a result of actual production usage. Just take a look at the top contributors and you can see the kind of contributions of the Redhat guys.

While I sort of agree with you on RHEL, I don't think this is the case with Openshift at all. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to people looking for a full solution.

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