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How Red Hat Can Recapture Developer Interest
snydeq writes: Developers are embracing a range of open source technologies, writes Matt Asay, virtually none of which are supported or sold by Red Hat, the purported open source leader. "Ask a CIO her choice to run mission-critical workloads, and her answer is a near immediate 'Red Hat.' Ask her developers what they prefer, however, and it's Ubuntu. Outside the operating system, according to AngelList data compiled by Leo Polovets, these developers go with MySQL, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL for their database; Chef or Puppet for configuration; and ElasticSearch or Solr for search. None of this technology is developed by Red Hat. Yet all of this technology is what the next generation of developers is using to build modern applications. Given that developers are the new kingmakers, Red Hat needs to get out in front of the developer freight train if it wants to remain relevant for the next 20 years, much less the next two."
From working in Linux-based IT for nearly a decade now, IT departments get very frustrated by Red Hat's package management and the concept of needing both an Entitlement and various Channels to get updates; on the flip side of this summary is Ubuntu, which IT departments can't stand due to it's constant change and instable nature. Every IT department I've worked in and with seems to prefer administering and deploying Debian and battles with devs on Ubuntu and management on Red Hat.
The great benefit of Red Hat is that it's stable and supported for a very long time, like 20 years. They don't change anything major in a release, and releases are few and far between. This is great for 'Enterprise' stuff, but the web is moving quickly and package support for RHEL boxes isn't great.
Having said that, where I work we have lots of stuff on RHEL/CentOS, and more and more stuff on Ubuntu. The Ubuntu stuff keeps me awake at night - literally. It's always falling over. I have never experience a kernel like the one the Ubuntu team are putting are. It's absolutely atrocious. The biggest problem is that the software we need to use has better support for Ubuntu than RHEL, so we're stuck using a dire OS to run it on.
The RHEL and CentOS boxes we have are rock solid stable and have never really given us significant issues. I walk into the office and get a new Ubuntu problem every day.
(FWIW I use Debian for all my own stuff exclusively, so I know my way around Debian-derivatives - this isn't a configuration issue).
The tension is stability versus the latest tech. RedHat purposely moves very, very slowly. The same can be said about Debian stable. As an admin I like slow moving targets. The problem is that developers want to use the latest stuff. So what does RedHat do about this? I think they are trying to solve it in two ways. First is their Software Collections. These are packages that site outside the base OS and are easy to pivot to the newer version. This allows for multiple versions of things like Python to be installed in parallel. Very handy!
Another thing that is helping quite a bit is Docker. RedHat is big on Docker. By packaging containers as apps, this allows a developer to easily control the dependencies outside of the OS that the app is running on. This makes everyone happy! Fedora is tracking some interesting tooling with Docker (geard, os-tree).
I like that RedHat tries to solve bigger problems than just packing and releasing a distro. They are trying to make things manageable (see FreeIPA, OpenLMI, RDO, CloudForms, oVirt)
Personally, I like RedHat. I like Debian. I run Fedora on my desktop and notebook. I maintain a CI/CD pipeline on RedHat at work. I never jumped on the Ubuntu bandwagon. It seems to me that Ubuntu has made quite a few more mis-steps in their short existence than RedHat has over the years. I get the feeling that a lot of people are just dropping back to Debian, which is just fine with me!