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Red Hat Makes Supported OpenStack Release
judgecorp writes "The OpenStack project could be the 'Linux of the cloud', according to Red Hat, which just announced a fully supported distribution of the open source software. The plan seems to be to offer it as a competitor to VMware's vSphere. From the article: 'The open source firm has been a member and supporter of OpenStack for some time, but with this announcement, its OpenStack distribution graduates from a “community release” similar to its Fedora Linux distribution, to a fully supported offering, comparable to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. The company wants to position OpenStack as a future cloud platform analogous to Linux, and is building it into a whole set of announcements and programs.'"
Redhat is all about servers so the desktop isn't really a valid comparison. I don't know whether they'll stick with it or not, but openstack llooks more up their alley than a linux desktop, not to mention more profit potential.
I meant as in "Fedora". That was years ago. So maybe I stand corrected. Only goes to prove that once you lose a customer, you lose him for life. Haven't been to their site in five years. I used to buy a RedHat CD every year just to "help out" Now I find it's better to give directly to the authors. - keep those pay pal links!
So, which OpenStack provider would you trust instead, which has been around for more than 5 years (the length of time between the first RH release in 1998 and the point where 'Red Hat Linux' turned into Fedora around 2003) and has never discontinued a single product?
Red Hat is the sole, most significant contributor or one of the main contributors to to an awful lot of those 'other open source projects':
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions (and that's massively incomplete)
It's a core principle of RH work that as much work as possible is done or pushed upstream, and that RH products should be 100% F/OSS (the exception to this is when we acquire proprietary software and spend a couple of years doing the legal and engineering spadework to make it 100% F/OSS, which is just a terrible thing for us to do, I know).
All of the source for RHEL is publicly available - http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS/ (and other paths on that server), go knock yourself out. (This is not minimal legal compliance, BTW; minimal legal compliance would be providing only copyleft sources, and providing them only to customers. We don't have to put the entire SRPM set up for public download on our own servers). You can get an evaluation version of RHEL 6 for free at https://ca.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/server/download.html - where 'evaluation' just means 'you only get updates for X days'. You can buy the RHEL Developer Suite - https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/developers/rhel_developer_suite.html - which includes RHEL with every single add-on, and access to all updates, just like having a commercial support contract only without the commercial support - for a measly $99. Or you can just go download CentOS or Scientific Linux, which projects RH does nothing whatsoever to impede.
RH is the single leading contributor to upstream OpenStack: http://readwrite.com/2013/04/16/will-red-hats-openstack-contributions-turn-to-gold
Name me a company that manages to run a sustainable business while contributing more to F/OSS development. One company.
No, not even close.
Have they used vSphere/ESXi? Other than both of them do something with Virtual Machines, I'm fairly certain they've never compared the two things.
OpenStack is your typical big open source mess that requires more than some assembly of parts that were clearly designed for Amazon scale sites rather than what most of the world would want.
VMware's products are semi-polished tools that a semi-competent Windows admin can fumble their way through and work with pretty GUIs to make it all work without much effort.
VMware is like normal furniture and OpenStack is like Ikea ... except you also have to cut most of the parts out yourself as well with OpenStack.
OpenStack is about 9 billion times more complicated than it should be for limited amount of functionality it actually provides overall.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So, to the Red Hat employees reading this: thank you! Red Hat does great work for the world. We as a community also tend to undervalue a $1B/year publicly traded company with a large sales force out explaining to every potential enterprise customer that will listen the virtues of free software.
The Dev Suite thing is kinda cool. Not that I'd buy it :-), but interesting to know that option exists.
but we fanboys made that server business possible, we got linux in the door over the last 15 years in corporations. the services are a mixture of open and closed.
Which distro is eating Redhat's lunch? Let me finish that thought for you, I think you mean Ubuntu, which has seen a large amount of angry users in the last 2 years.
Redhat is a fantastic server distro. Its rock-solid stable, has long term support, and you'll never find that you have problems with support. In fact, the Redhat folk bend over backwards to support you. They charge for their enterprise offering? What sort of a world do we live in when people charge money for a support contract?
Fedora is free, and RHEL is based on Fedora - its their proving grounds. "But that's not RHEL!" Of course not. Its the bleeding edge. RHEL is a few steps ahead of debian in terms of modern versions but is as stable.
Like you, I once talked badly about Redhat, this was many many years ago, before I had to support clouds of thousands and thousands of virtual machines. Try supporting and auditing that many servers with any other distro - let me know how it goes for you and how long it takes to support. (I program c, c++, perl, ruby, I've been using Linux for 16 years and have contributed to many open source projects. Don't even try to say I'm a newb or if I knew what I was doing I'd use .
Redhat's claim to fame is that you get what you pay for. Sure, there are other Linux distros you can pay for - but have you tried to support them in a large centralized manner with serious oversight? (Suse, I'm looking at you...)
Sure, Debian is great. But when it comes to convincing the director/executive level folk to go with Debian and then pay some 3rd party company of unknowns to support it.................Well, I'm just saying, Redhat is my choice, and I think they are fucking awesome.
The last corporation I worked for had their entire estate of developers running a mixture of CentOS / RedHat on their developer desktops. You can't tell me 5000+ employees of this corporation are 'fanboys', can you?
The current business I work for has all of their systems administrators running Linux on their desktop (Fedora and/or CentOS). If you're a serious user of the Linux technology stack, you'd better not be using Windows as by comparison it's shit.
"Thousands and thousands of virtual machines. Try supporting and auditing that many servers with any other distro ..."
Puppet, CFEngine, Tripwire, etc. all play well with other Linux distros as well. If you're talking about just using RedHat Satellite to manage such a beast, get out of 2001, RH really missed the boat on pushing such potential in the Enterprise space and only over past year seem to be winking at Puppet. If you're talking about their efforts on OpenStack, great, but you still need that next layer down.