What is our primary use case?
I typically use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in my federal government contracts. Federal government customers are the only ones that use Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Most government agencies use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because they have a requirement for commercial support. That is the only reason why Red Hat Enterprise Linux gets used over any other Linux distribution.
What is most valuable?
The only reason our clients use Red Hat Enterprise Linux is because Red Hat offers commercial support.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a solid product. They have decent support, although not the best. They have a good knowledge base and a well-developed ecosystem.
What needs improvement?
Recently, Red Hat did a strange thing where they took over the CentOS project and changed several things in their pipeline. I don't believe that I, or the vast majority of Linux systems engineers out there, are fans of their development process for the operating system.
The way that Red Hat used to work was that they had a free version. It was the community version called CentOS. Everything that Red Hat developed, they backported to the CentOS community. About four or five years ago, they took over the CentOS community and they killed off CentOS. They were pushing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux stream variant, which was supposed to be the replacement. I wish they would just go back to the way it was before. I do not like the new development process and the new hierarchy. The vast majority of people in the Red Hat open-source community also do not care for it much.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since its inception. I started using Red Hat Linux in 1999, but I do not remember what year it became Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
How are customer service and support?
They are typically slow to respond. I feel their first-line support is lacking in knowledge.
Their knowledge base is pretty decent. It is pretty standard. Linux is such a mature product now that the knowledge bases for all the major distributions, even the open-source free ones, are so vast. I do not know if any Linux distribution offers any real advantage over others when it comes to the knowledge base.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have worked with all operating systems. I have been doing this for 30 years. In the military, I was a Windows and Linux systems administrator. I was using Solaris Unix back then. I have been using Windows for about 30 years, and then I have used all Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Mandrake, Yellow Dog, etc. If there is a Linux distribution out there, I have probably used it in a project somewhere.
The only reason that I, or anybody else, uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux is because it offers commercial support. That is it.
The Red Hat package management system is inferior to most other package management systems in the Linux world, mostly to the Debian-based ones that used the App system versus the Red Hat RPM package management systems. Red Hat is also not as unified or as streamlined as other distributions.
How was the initial setup?
The setup is pretty simple and very straightforward. I would rate it a seven out of ten for the ease of setup. Its upgrades are moderately straightforward.
The management depends on where those systems live. On-prem ones are managed differently than the cloud ones. Cloud-to-cloud ones are managed differently. Red Hat is slightly more work-intensive than other Linux distributions. I feel that Debian-based distributions, such as Ubuntu, Devuan, and AntiX, are easier to manage than the Red Hat-based distributions, and obviously, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the flagship for all those distributions.
What was our ROI?
It is used just to meet requirements. Being government agencies, they do what they have to do to meet requirements. It helps them meet the requirements of having commercial support, and that is about the extent of it.
What other advice do I have?
I am not a big fan of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I use it because government customers have a requirement to use it, but outside of that, I would never voluntarily use it. In fact, I recommend against using it.
We do not use features that are proprietary to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We do our best to avoid proprietary tools. We stick to open-source tools. Typically, we use things like Ansible to achieve those goals.
I am a consultant, so I have worked with both on-premises and cloud deployments. I have used it in both Azure and AWS. It is client-defined. Our workloads are not hybrid workloads. They are usually dedicated. If we put a workload in the cloud, it is all in the cloud. If we put a workload on-prem, it is all on-prem. I do not know if Red Hat necessarily provides any special features to support hybrid workloads, and if it does, we certainly do not use them. We try to stay away from Red Hat-integrated tools and utilize industry-standard tools. We use Terraform and Ansible. Ansible is now owned by Red Hat, so it is technically a Red Hat tool, but it is also an open-source project.
I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten. It is good for commercial usage, but I would never use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a startup environment.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Implementer