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What's wrong with enterprise Linux

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Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#101

Post by samstave »

mfer wrote: post #75
darkhelmet wrote: post #7

There is another problem that wasn't covered in the article. The 10+ years of stability leads to behaviors and outcomes that remind me of the long-lived SSL certificate problem. Updating is done so infrequently that the "how?" is forgotten. As the 10 year support limit approaches, most of the old team members who did it last time are gone, tech debt is through the roof, few people know where everything is or how to b…

Think of all the places Linux runs. Planes, trains, and automobiles. Medical equipment. So many other places. Many places that don't have readily available network access. Yet, many "enterprises" need support here. If a medical device or train works but needs support for years and years, should someone be constantly updating Linux? What about the software that runs on Linux and is tested there? Considering just the m…

>>*Think of all the places Linux runs. """Planes, trains, and automobiles""". Medical equipment.*

Where is your other embedded equipment???

I love that movie.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#102

Post by tosihakkeri »

weare138 wrote: post #34
mbreese wrote: post #2

> The Case for Oracle Linux I did not see that twist coming. Strangely, the author makes a good point. Oracle or not, sticking closer to the upstream kernel is not a bad way to manage an “enterprise” kernel. Maybe we’ve all been too willing to sit back and accept how RHEL does kernels as “the way”.

But what stops Oracle from just pulling a Red Hat when people switch over to Oracle Linux? Oracle hasn't exactly proven itself to be trustworthy over the years and that's putting it lightly. I think we need a fully open source alternative to RHEL not bound to any company. Something akin to the Debian project that can serve as an upstream reference distro and repository.

> I think we need a fully open source alternative to RHEL not bound to any company

I believe the problem is not that there wouldn’t be open source alternatives but that that’s not what enterprise wants. Enterprise wants a company behind the distribution.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#103

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

lasermike026 wrote: post #79

This whole model is in decline. Most companies have moved to the cloud and are using kubernetes. If you're running servers a datacenter then you might use enterprise linux. You are probably using some kind of virtualization like ESX or Nutanix. You might be using k8s there too. The age of running your own linux servers is ending in a way.

Most unicorn companies with an average half-life measured in months, maybe. Most companies worldwide across all industries, probably not. The pendulum will swing the other way sooner or later anyway as it always does.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#104

Post by wkat4242 »

_ea1k wrote: post #78
darkhelmet wrote: post #7

There is another problem that wasn't covered in the article. The 10+ years of stability leads to behaviors and outcomes that remind me of the long-lived SSL certificate problem. Updating is done so infrequently that the "how?" is forgotten. As the 10 year support limit approaches, most of the old team members who did it last time are gone, tech debt is through the roof, few people know where everything is or how to b…

Having worked in both kinds of cultures, I tend to agree. Keeping up is ultimately less pain than trying to upgrade things in huge chunks. But it can be really hard to change the culture at a place that has a long history of "ain't broke, don't fix it" engineering.

Less pain yes but more efficient? I'm not sure.

The places that don't do constant upgrades also don't usually have teams looking after that. If they time it right they can do with less people.

Of course it's less reliable not having as much active knowledge but I do think it can be cheaper if nothing goes wrong.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#105

Post by gjvc »

darkhelmet wrote: post #100
pavon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good point, however I've not heard of too many cases where organizations intentionally skip RHEL releases. Systems that are being actively developed do regularly upgrade through each RHEL release, and the 10 year support just lets them be lazy about how quickly they do so. The only systems I see intentionally riding out the 10+ year support are deprecated systems that are already announced to sunset by the…

It's one of the things that ground Yahoo to a halt. We spent years migrating from RHEL-4 to 6, then RHEL-6 to RHEL-7, and by the time the projects were pretty much complete, the next sunset was approaching. My cynicism comes from seeing the bad things that "Enterprise Linux" enabled there. Admittedly, Yahoo was an extreme case. It never solved the really building problem - the culture from the early days was to compi…

If it's hard or error prone, then do it frequently until you get the process nailed down.

Major life lesson -- practice makes perfect.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#106

Post by sofixa »

curt15 wrote: post #60
microtonal wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using whatever Python your distribution needed is bad practice. Own your application environment, there are plenty of ways to do this, such as Nix and Docker, which make your Python environments reproducible across systems. Also, Enterprise Linus is one of the reasons (definitely not the only) that the migration took such a long time. Too many enterprise shops that stuck with Python 2 because it's the lazy thing to d…

>Using whatever Python your distribution needed is bad practice. Own your application environment, there are plenty of ways to do this, such as Nix and Docker, which make your Python environments reproducible across systems. How far down does "own your application environment" extend? How about libc? What is the role of the underlying OS?

> What is the role of the underlying OS?

Ideally none, with scratch containers for applications and the bare minimum running under your orchestrator which becomes your main interface.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#107

Post by postmodest »

bonzini wrote: post #23
derekp7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you end up with the same problem with the automation that has been running fine for 5 years, then suddenly breaks? And the person that set it up is either gone, or has no clue how they did it 5 years ago.

The idea is that you deploy from scratch all the infrastructure every 6 months, first to testing and then to production.

All you damn kids work in a different industry than I do.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#108

Post by ghaff »

pavon wrote: post #50
darkhelmet wrote: post #7

There is another problem that wasn't covered in the article. The 10+ years of stability leads to behaviors and outcomes that remind me of the long-lived SSL certificate problem. Updating is done so infrequently that the "how?" is forgotten. As the 10 year support limit approaches, most of the old team members who did it last time are gone, tech debt is through the roof, few people know where everything is or how to b…

That is a good point, however I've not heard of too many cases where organizations intentionally skip RHEL releases. Systems that are being actively developed do regularly upgrade through each RHEL release, and the 10 year support just lets them be lazy about how quickly they do so. The only systems I see intentionally riding out the 10+ year support are deprecated systems that are already announced to sunset by the…

>I've not heard of too many cases where organizations intentionally skip RHEL releases.

I assume you mean major releases. Less common than minor releases but, especially for air-gapped equipment, it's not that unusual.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#109

Post by opk »

We use Oracle Linux where I work because we used to use Solaris. At one point it looked suspiciously like Redhat had explicitly removed support for some Oracle hardware from their kernel and the UEK saved us. Besides the kernel they also offer a few other extras and optional newer versions like dtrace, support for some extra filesystems and newer KVM. I get the impression that the fact that they're underdogs in the Linux market helps to keep them honest. Much of their key staff are clearly open source advocates even if Larry only cares about money. And while the Oracle support is not up to the standards of the old Sun support it really isn't a bad choice. And it'd be easy to switch away if we ever need to.

Re: What's wrong with enterprise Linux

#110

Post by ineedasername »

>Oracle Linux... set aside your automatic (and justified) repulsion

I can't for two reasons:

1) The only way I avoid the repulsive side of Oracle in this is if I don't care about having a reliable guaranteed enterprise support contract. No one is going to have more expertise in how this distro is built & functions than Oracle, and that's the no-go zone.

2) It's not just about the current status of the project but also the future and what happens if this author is successful and lots of people switch over to Oracle Linux. Nothing stops them from switching things up at short notice (unless I pay them for a service guarantee!) and pulling the rug out from underneath the whole thing. And the more that people adopt it as their distro of choice, the more likely Oracle is to look around for some way to monetize it at gun-point (well, crippling legal bills at least)

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