I’ve come across Red Hat allot lately and am wondering if I need to get studying. I’m an avid Ubuntu server user but don’t want to get stuck only knowing one distro. What is the way to go if i want to know as much as I can for use in real world situations.
RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.
All are good choices.
Well, maybe not Redhat these days…
Red hat with UBI-Micro still mostly deployed after alpine in enterprise and mission critical server, so let us see if it’ dwindling in next 3-5 years ahead.
Ubuntu, RedHat, AWS Linux, Arch. Honestly distros in production are pretty similar since they’re all headless and pretty pared-down. If you just know the logistics of a few package managers and init systems you’ll be good.
I’m surprised to see arch on your list, I know everything runs in containers now but arch seems way too unstable O_o
By unstable I don’t mean “buggy”, but “you will have to adapt to new major version of package XXX or you can’t fetch updates anymore, so no security patches anymore”.
From my experience, the host doesn’t matter when you’re using containers, VMs, or even containers inside VMs for your deployments.
Having said that, I prefer Debian for a single host just because I don’t have to think about it. Then again, what I’d be running on it won’t specific to Debian.
Nowadays you hear about “reproducible environments” for a good reason.
I never ran into this so I don’t really know what you’re talking about
You mean you never received any major package update on arch ? 😛
More seriously, it depends on what we are talking about, if everything runs in container I agree that it kinda doesn’t matter, you will just have a more up to date kernel, but it is stable enough.
Other peoples on this thread are talking about actual system dependancies, for example installing a postgres server from official repo. On this example it would require a database migration as soon as a major postgres version is released, which means some downtime and non-scheduled maintainance.
Depends on context.
If you want to get a job as a “Linux admin” then Red Hat is basically what you want as a “default”. Fedora will give you something you can use at home that’s broadly similar. You will need to learn more than just that though.
Debian.
To tag onto this, what makes RHEL so special? Is it just the support you get from Red Hat or is there something about the distro that makes it so widely used?
Beyond support agreements that others are mentioning, the huge requirement for the shop I work at (mid-scale high performance computing center) it’s 3rd party vendor package support. Mellanox/nvidia, whamcloud, slurm, vast, and on and on. Driver packages targeting rhel kernels are an industry standard offering if a vendor supports linux. That’s not always the case with Debian variants, for instance.
Same with huge applications and proprietary compiler suites (think matlab and the intel compiler suite or OneAPI). These are hugely important packages for a number of shops.
Don’t get me wrong, I can build against plenty of other distros but my vendors target rhel as a first class citizen for both build scripts and straight binary packaging.
It is 100% the support. Corporations pay big money to have experts on call to fix things fast when they break, and there’s basically no other player for that kind of model in the Linux space.
Debian could stand against it, if https://www.debian.org/consultants/ and https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended consolidated, sadly for now, it isn’t, and I don’t see any project go towards it.
Support contracts for risk mitigation is a big part of it, and the other is RH release engineering is amazing.
Aside from that, RHEL, and clones, is a very straight forward, clean distro. It’s very focused with everything doted and tidy, and overall, it has a very uncomplicated feel to it. In contrast Debian derivatives are kind of messy, and SUSE tries to stuff every function into a single application.
RHEL does push a lot of technology. Out of the stable distros, it will be the first to put tech into production. RH does a lot with integration with other systems. This has kept me off of SUSE in the past. RHEL was more tech forward, comparatively.
dnf downgrade
dnf history undo
dnf history redo
it’s very very very critical for most case :')
The support is a huge part of it. Being able to submit a ticket or call in to get help with a strange quirk is extremely valuable to a lot of companies. Additionally, having a licensed distribution like this means there’s built in trust. Red Hat has been a big player in this space forever and are well trusted already, too. So there’s a huge community of people who have used the product to talk to or hire. They also have certifications for rhel, supported by Red Hat, and those carry weight in the industry to some degree.
I once worked in for a small publishing company years ago, circa 2005, where they used CentOS on the desktop and server environments. Deploying a new desktop was as simple as using kickstart. They had their infrastructure down to a science.
I hope I can get my company to go linux. But for now I can only use it for myself. But i’m quietly pushing :)
Good luck, users at my company would flip out if the desktop wallpaper was unfamiliar.
I’d suggest RedHat and SUSE as well.
Mostly mission critical server that I deployed in the past, all use RHEL/Clones because their LTS, and stability across packages version.
If for hobbyist, it’s Ubuntu. I think you need to learn more about ansible, container/podman/openshift, and SDN for work. Nowdays, there are some use APT in production, but mostly they switch to dnf because dnf have better way to do downgrade, undo, redo, and config package in production.
This applied mostly for ERP project such as SAP Hanna, SQL Server, DB2, etc… Like it not, Red Hat Dwindling isn’t now, probably 5-10 years ahead, but I’m not sure, as mostly rant about RHEL are in Community. I do know regional linux user group in Indonesia, some are leaving EL group, but they still can’t rip apart most mission critical server on top of RHEL/Clones… so it’s still worth learning RHEL/Clones, and use Fedora for day 2 day task, and learn ubuntu, as well ubuntu pro, for learn deploying critical production server.
Debian and Ubuntu are near, and ubuntu is derived from debian, but if you talk spirit, they are different… If you are conscious about what Red Hat do, stay away from it, but if you are working in corporate, you can’t go without learning it.
Fun fact. At Heineken Netherlands we also happen to use SAP. the backend is using SLES-11 how ever
Well SLES is quite lean near RHEL, they have same rpm/dnf pkg manager, which is near RHEL, but not B2B compatible, or even ABI compatible, but SUSE is okayish, but I don’t know, many corporate that work for aren’t keen using it haha… 😂
Well at least, seems Europe have different kind of market, but having competitor is driving industry forward isn’t it?
Well SAP is from German, but I don’t know why it’s much for popular on top of RHEL, rather than other. I do know Ubuntu support SAP, but never seen one in the wild in Asia Pasific. 😂
Also I remember IBM Watson is on top SLES? 😂😂 Dunno if IBM replace it with Red Hat? Haha… 😂
100% sure its Debian.
Mission critical server mostly are RHEL or EL Clone or Fedora or it’s derivative… If you combine even Azure nowdays, Microsoft Linux is derived from Fedora, same as Amazon Linux, and others… Debian are covering some part, but mostly hobbyist, or SME, and mostly non critical, as they don’t have standard across, even on their https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended and https://www.debian.org/consultants/
apt also bad when you got to dowgrade package when something mess up, and get messy with dpkg… :'(
So I quite doubt if it’s production env, mostly go with EL. I do know some company use Ubuntu/Debian, but it’s quite few…
If Ubuntu/Debian want to shape Industries, and kick out RHEL, they need to have standard, and better consultancy than RHEL. I hope so that they could grow and make market competitive, but for now it isn’t sadly.
Debian needs to focus more on automation if they want more penetration in the enterprise. Debian feels made for human admins logging in and managing things old school style which is fine for a few machines. Modern enterprises use Ansible etc and need highly functional non-interactive ways to install and configure etc. Preseed and Apt leave something to be desired here.
All of my personal servers are Debian. My last company switched their entire production fleet from centos to Debian. I think a lot of people switched to Debian back when the Centos Stream debacle went down.
I work for a well known internet company, and its 98% redhat (or derivative) with some alpine and ubuntu scattered about randomly
Where I’m at, that would be Ubuntu, followed by Debian.
It really depends. I work for a large company and we use Ubuntu, Oracle, RedHat, and SLES. We were moving from Oracle to Ubuntu but now we are going back to RedHat.
Currently we deploy like this: Ubuntu: PostgreSQL, web servers, some engineering workstations, and big data Oracle & RedHat: web servers, security applications, and network systems
So just having a fundamental understanding of Linux and you will be fine SUSE: SAP and HR software
What’s the reason if I may ask why they are moving to Red Hat instead?
Mostly cost. We used to run a lot of Oracle databases and they have become extremely expensive to keep running. So we are migrating to PostgreSQL. The servers were getting migrated to CentOS but now that RedHat fucked that distro we are going back to RedHat. Part of that deal is switching from chef to Ansible. So to save costs we are consolidating to a single vendor.
Oracle DB are sucking a lot of money, but they fork RHEL for free…(well it is open for everyone), they offer more expensive contract on top of Oracle DB, what a free estate… haha… Nice work ORACLE… :/
If you want to learn more than one distro, try setting up Docker containers for various services. The base distros in the containers use the same commands as on the base metal
I’ve been seeing a lot of alpine based containers recently. Used to see a lot of Ubuntu, debian, redhat.
I think a lot of it depends on if you are spinning a lot of containers up.
