My main use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is running virtual machines. That's probably the most important use case for us.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps us solve pain points related to security. We want security, so it is hardened, and just supports us. As a financial institution we take security very seriously.

The feature I appreciate the most from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is support and simplicity. 

The knowledge base is good; they have a lot of documentation. 

We manage our Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems when it comes to provisioning and patching through Ansible. Everything's straightforward and efficient.

Adding more relevant features to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) would be great. I have seen some issues on GitHub where people are suggesting things, such as Ansible. There are many community issues that could be implemented into Red Hat.

We try to stay two versions below the latest one just to make sure that we have security checked there and to avoid running into any bugs or issues with the latest release. We just try to apply patches as much as we can.

The stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are smooth as we have not encountered any problems or issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales perfectly with the growing needs of my company. It's easy to scale up with the tools we have.

My experience with the customer service and technical support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been amazing; they are very helpful. We open up a ticket, and we get someone to help right away.

Positive

The deployment is a smooth process. Some of the issues we have are just related to multiple vulnerabilities, and that's on our side to fix, however, everything else is smooth. We have no complaints.

The biggest return on investment for me when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is how they have their foundation set. They have everything organized, documentation's there, it's globally used everywhere, and it's good software with good tools.

I'm not in the pricing conversation. I can't speak to costs.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped me mitigate downtime and lower risks. They specifically thrive on criticism, and they don't take it lightly. They mentioned earlier in the panel that they wanted to prioritize the big CVs and any vulnerability that's important. Although some don't get exploited, it's good to have fewer of those numbers. 

We try to stay two versions below the latest one.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) overall an eight out of ten.

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are mostly just running applications, web servers, app servers, databases, etc.

I don't have a preference on features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), as I appreciate many of them. While just getting into cloud, I'd say the best feature is YUM, DNF, and related tools, which are simple and easy to use and manage. 

The simplicity of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) benefits my company in general since we're under many audits and regulations that allow us to track any discrepancies we may find in the reports, as to remediate those vulnerabilities and apply the necessary patches so that we can be compliant with our systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points through vulnerability management, and its Satellite has been a really good tool to help us track vulnerabilities as well as patching the server.

We are hybrid, so we deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) both in the cloud and on-premise. For our cloud needs, we use both Azure and AWS. We have a good track record with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and security, due to their ability to produce Day 1 patches, quick responses, and great customer support when we face problems.

When it comes to provisioning and patching, we usually manage our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) patching in a monthly cycle, using Ansible to help update our monthly downloads from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, move it to our satellite, and then push it out to our servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) supports our hybrid cloud strategy. We mostly use both Windows and Red Hat, making it our primary Linux operating system for applications, and we've been using the Red Hat images that we've created for cloud, deploying them there with the necessary utilities and applications.

I assess the knowledge base offered by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system fairly positively, especially for support questions, however, the only issue I have is that often, you have to log in with your provider ID; in some cases, I understand. That said, there are others that are not just generally support specific to Red Hat, which is a problem.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped to mitigate downtime and lower risk through our ability to patch quickly, with relatively fast reboot times, and the amount of changes applied that don't affect systems much, especially with patching, so everything works as designed with very little incompatibility issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved by offering more on the Ansible side, with more integration with Ansible Satellite and all their tools for a one-stop area that manages both vulnerabilities and image deployments in a workflow pipeline.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since Red Hat 4, which was a long time ago.

Its stability and reliability are fair and stable, with not too many issues encountered as long as no one is messing with the kernel configuration.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales really well with the growing needs of my company, as long as we have licenses.

I find customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) better than most; it's good.

Positive

Before Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we were using SUSE Linux, starting originally with Red Hat, then switching to SUSE 10 and 11, and ultimately switching back to Red Hat 7.

My experience with deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has gotten easier over the years, especially with Ansible, as it has become more automated, replacing a lot of the tasks we used to do by command-line interface with more Ansible playbooks and workflows.

From my point of view and a technical perspective, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the ease to spin up the instances and the fact that many people still prefer the command-line interface, which has significantly less overhead than a Windows system.

Regarding the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I'm not really involved with the budget, however, it seems to be okay for what we currently have.

A while ago, we considered SUSE and looked at Ubuntu before we ended up choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as our solution.

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an eight out of ten. 

To make it a ten, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) would need to allow systems to remain operational even if licenses expire, especially on a virtualized platform, and perhaps also improve Ansible integration.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Neutral

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.

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.

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.

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.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is used within our organization to orchestrate a multitenant, microservice-based architecture. This supports a distributed system of predominantly web-based applications and frontends. A typical deployment involves around 60 to 70 Amazon EC2 instances working in concert.

The primary use cases involve running interconnected applications with requirements such as low latency and high availability, often achieved through redundant, multi-tenant, and load-balanced architectures. These applications may utilize read or write-optimized instances or be memory or processor-optimized, depending on their specific needs. Optimization is achieved through the processor, RAM, and connected protocols. The foundation for these applications is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux facilitates seamless workload migration between diverse cloud environments and data centers. In DevOps, workload portability between cloud and data centers is crucial, so we prioritize operating systems supported by multiple cloud providers and available locally. Key considerations include stability, security hardening capabilities, and the ability to obtain government or compliance organization approvals, which are incredibly stringent in sectors like banking and securities exchange. Red Hat Enterprise Linux meets these requirements by providing a secure, reliable, and consistently delivered operating system that facilitates approvals and ensures seamless workload mobility.

Regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux provisioning and patching, both processes are generally straightforward. Patching can be completed within a few hours. Once the automation pipelines are properly configured, tested, and operational, provisioning can be fully automated. This applies to any operating system, not just Red Hat. Setting up a correct pipeline ensures smooth provisioning regardless of the OS.

Implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux has resulted in significant resource savings due to its efficient usage of minimal resources. Compared to other operating systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux requires less RAM and CPU allocation, which translates to cost savings. Additionally, its stability and minimal downtime contribute to operational efficiency.

The Red Hat command line interface is more user-friendly than the Windows command line interface. Red Hat makes it easier to perform tasks like reviewing logs, checking network connectivity, checking DNS, and setting up a proxy. Additionally, searching for specific characters within numerous log files is simpler in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux instance compared to other operating systems.

The implementation and limitations of SELinux should be re-evaluated. Its current configuration presents numerous challenges and restricts certain functionalities, hindering the overall usability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Addressing these limitations would significantly enhance the operating system's flexibility and efficiency.

I've been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for six years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is almost perfect in terms of stability. It works consistently with minimal downtime and very few bugs or glitches, deserving a high rating for stability.

There are no issues with scalability when it comes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It scales efficiently, fulfilling our needs without difficulty.

My experience contacting Red Hat technical support was positive, with knowledgeable and supportive staff, particularly during early hours. However, I found more detailed knowledge through community interactions on platforms like Stack Overflow.

Positive

Before adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux for production applications, other Linux operating systems like Ubuntu and Windows servers were used for monitoring and testing purposes. Red Hat Enterprise Linux became the choice for critical server applications.

The initial setup of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is straightforward. Once the images and database information are available, the automation process is simple and efficient, taking only a couple of hours to complete.

Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux can yield resource savings of 200 percent to 300 percent compared to Windows Server instances. Its minimal RAM and CPU usage allows for smaller instances, resulting in significant cost reductions.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a more cost-effective solution than Windows Servers. Windows Servers base their cost on the number of users and have high licensing fees, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers free versions alongside its paid, supported versions. This makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux a good option for startups and organizations with limited budgets. While the free versions may lack direct vendor support, the availability of paid support options and the robust Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem provides flexibility for growing businesses. Additionally, the presence of compatible open-source alternatives further enhances cost-effectiveness and choice. Overall, Red Hat Enterprise Linux presents a compelling advantage in terms of cost compared to other operating systems, especially for nascent organizations.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux eight out of ten.

While Red Hat offers free license versions and CentOS provides a similar platform, the official Red Hat documentation may not be the most helpful resource. More valuable support can often be found in community-driven platforms like Stack Overflow, where users share their knowledge and experiences through questions and answers. This user-generated content often proves more practical and supportive than the official Red Hat resources.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is deployed in a multi-region configuration with three availability zones per region. Data is replicated from region one to region two, which serves as a read-only replica. Traffic is load-balanced across all availability zones within a region, ensuring automatic failover to the remaining zones in case of an outage. Similarly, if an entire region fails, traffic is redirected to the other available region. This setup provides high availability and disaster recovery capabilities. We have a couple of thousand users in our organization.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux requires periodic updates. To manage logs, a retrieval and deletion method is necessary, which can be achieved using built-in features like cron jobs. Red Hat supports these features. Additionally, security patches should be applied as they become available.

I recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux, particularly for enterprise implementation, due to its lightweight and secure design. Its robust community support and extensive availability of solutions in forums and unofficial resources make it preferable to other operating systems.

My primary use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is for cloud-related tasks, such as working on AWS. Specifically, I create virtual servers on Amazon EC2 instances. My department has 50 people using the solution.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has increased our productivity by making monitoring more manageable and allowing us to be more proactive. We get more information we need from the virtual machines using the command line. It's also a highly secured system with built-in protections. We've also saved time because command-line operations are more efficient. Time is money, so we also save money by decreasing our time on these tasks. 

When I started working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in March 2021, I did not immediately realize its benefits. It took me several months to understand the full power of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the problems it solves. After three to six months, I recognized the full power of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

The most valuable feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is its command-line capabilities, which allow you to execute large operations quickly. For example, let's say you want to create a hundred files or directories. In Windows, you need to create each one by hand, which is difficult and time-consuming. Linux has multiple commands to create files in a few seconds. It also has the "top" command that gives you all the processes running and their utilization of resources like CPU, RAM, etc. That isn't possible with a management console or GUI.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has good security features, so it's harder to breach than Windows. There's also a large Red Hat Enterprise Linux user community, so when I get stuck, I can go to Stack Overflow or other user forums and get help. I typically get a solution within a few hours when I post a question. 

I don't handle patching and provisioning because I don't have much experience, but I've heard from senior engineers that it's easy on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux could make some back-end improvements. On the front end, Red Hat Enterprise Linux could make the interface more colorful and improve the user experience. A better-looking interface would attract more customers.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since March 2021.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable, providing a reliable platform for our operations.

I would rate the scalability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as nine out of ten, indicating it scales well with our needs.

I rate Red Hat support eight out of 10. The technical support is excellent. They are readily available to assist with any technical issues that arise. Their documentation is clear and built into the GUI, so you can easily access information if you're curious about a topic. Red Hat has a large, well-informed user community.

Positive

Previously, I used only Windows, but now I use Windows, Linux, and AWS environments. I transitioned to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as it enhances productivity, reducing the time-consuming aspects of software development and project management.

Setting up Red Hat Enterprise Linux wasn't complex, but also not overly simple. It was about average. It took about half an hour to deploy the solution at one location. After deployment, we need to install updates, but that process has gone pretty smoothly.

We have a team of more than twelve individuals working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has saved us time and increased productivity. We've also saved money by not purchasing other operating systems, such as Windows or Mac. 

Most Indians will find Red Hat Enterprise Linux a little costly. It's slightly above average. Its pricing has room for improvement because it's more expensive in the local market due to purchasing power parity in India. 

I highly recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux to others due to its productivity benefits and efficient command-line operations. It offers key advantages in terms of time-saving, security, and community support.

I work on SAP HANA, which is on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a good support portal that I rely on.

The system rules are helpful for segregation of duties, as they provide us with more feasible access to the system, allowing us to register it accordingly.

We immediately see the benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

From an administrative perspective, the cloud platform is the best because we don't have to wait long. It's a portal, so we can access whatever we want through it, whether the Azure portal or the AWS portal; we click, and it'll purchase it for us. Some deployments take 30 to 40 minutes. But in most cases, especially for small services, it's just a few seconds to three minutes. From a business perspective, the pay-as-you-go concept is where we only pay for what we use. So those are the two things I like most about the cloud version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud can become costly over the long term.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for six years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud is stable with a 99.9 percent uptime. Regional redundancies are used to ensure data accessibility.

The initial deployment was a little challenging until I became familiar with the solution through the portal. We did encounter a handshaking issue with Azure that required submitting a ticket to Microsoft, but otherwise, the process went smoothly. A team of four were involved in the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux eight out of ten.

We have to apply patches weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on their purpose.

We had no concerns about using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud because both AWS and Azure supported it, and they provided support if needed.

We are using the solution for automation. Mainly, we're doing a lot of automation with it. One of the projects, for example, is for ensuring payments processes on forms. We streamline and optimize the insurance claims process using OpenShift. This has enabled us to do faster claims processes and make resource utilization more efficient than it was. Everything can be done online. There are no papers involved. 

It is mainly just cutting out redundant tasks. The focus was mainly driven by driving costs down and efficient resource utilization. We wanted a solution that could make deployment easy and ensure scalability.

The biggest benefit has been the automation. It affected our delivery schedule. Instead of doing something in two weeks, we do it faster. We've cut down our production time. And people are able to focus on other tasks since they're automating a lot of things. Even with our clients, when they have issues, we have created a system where they can send out a ticket. And from that ticket, we can diagnose, and it's easier to solve the issue at hand. 

In terms of cost per head, we've seen a drastic drawdown from that. It is mainly optimizing a lot of our systems and resources.

The high availability is great. It's available most of the time - even when we're doing upgrades, provisioning, configuration, and patching. It made things easier for us. 

The automation is great. I'm a big fan of offering convenience to people and making systems easier for people to understand and use. 

There are good features, such as proactive monitoring as well. It offers predictive analytics, which helps you identify issues before they impact operations. We can foresee several problems. On top of that, this is how we can combat those problems. These types of features are really valuable when considering a company's strategy and when it comes to the impact of operations. 

We are able to move workloads between different clouds or our data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The knowledge base on offer is quite extensive. We started learning from a third-party provider since we've had a lot of use cases. Maybe you are installing something, or maybe during virtualization, you have to do something, and you need more information. The Red Hat OpenShift community is quite huge. Even a resource such as YouTube has people releasing videos on common problems. Even outside of Red Hat itself, the Red Hat community is very good. The information is extensive. The knowledge base is there. There's a lot of information sharing. People do not try to gatekeep information. 

When it comes to provisioning and patching, so far, we have not had a lot of issues. We currently are using a subscription model. In terms of getting security patches and updates, they support us quite well. There's a 24-hour support base and they're quite good. 

I've tried the Leapp and Red Hat Insights features. It helps with proactive monitoring. It did analyze the system configurations and compares those against databases of known problems and fixes. Basically, there's a pool of data that has common issues and it analyzes how you've configured your system and then compares them. It can come back to you and say, "Hey, this is your problem. Why don't you try the solution?" It's like a good AI tool. It gives us a lot of help. It's quick. Thanks to this feature, we sometimes find that we don't really need to open a ticket for support.

We realized the benefits of using RHEL in months. We were told when we were doing the onboarding, we'd see benefits in six months. For us, it took a little over eight months. That was due to some of our internal processes that we had to do, some sign-offs, et cetera. Still, it took us less than a year. Over time, we are down 20% to 30%.

In the beginning, we didn't start on the cloud. Only now are we fully transitioning to going off-site. There are still some clients who are a little resistant to going to the cloud. It's nice to be hybrid, to accommodate both. We've done a lot of virtualization and server consolidation. So far, everything is running smoothly. 

When moving workloads between different clouds or data centers, it's not that simple. There are a lot of things that you need to consider, including prerequisites and things like hardware, network, operating systems, et cetera. Once you get the hang of it, it becomes easier. However, in the beginning, it was very, very challenging. Coming from a development background, I found it easier to use command lines.

I've hit some snags doing updates or changing things for clients. 

It would be nice if they improved vulnerability management. They could add more security tools and tools for provisioning. 

I've used the solution for two years. 

The stability is good. We don't really have any downtime. I'd rate stability nine out of ten. 

We've had no issues with scalability. It's quite user-friendly. 

During the implementation, we did have to open a support ticket. They assisted us effectively.

Positive

I've never tried other solutions. I know of other solutions, such as Ubuntu. However, my interactions with that solution have been minimal. 

The initial setup was a little bit complex. The instructions, however, were very clear, and our deployment strategy was clear. Still, for the technicians doing it, it was complex.

The setup took about a week and a half.  

I've been involved with two upgrades so far. They were challenging. There were a lot of teams involved. There needed to be a lot of migration planning. We had to use the Link Utility and we did a lot of testing first. We spent a long time verifying the applications and checking dependencies. It was quite a learning curve.

There is some maintenance needed in the form of system updates. 

We did get a lot of help from RHEL. We had senior engineers guide us through the setup.

We've seen an ROI of around 30%.

When we went through IBM, it was quite expensive. Now, we are going through AWS, which is less pricey. 

We started off as a partner to IBM, and IBM opened up the opportunity for us to build certifications for Red Hat through the certification program. Then we became support specialists, taking on RHEL projects. We are in the process of becoming a reseller. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. We're doing a lot of big data infrastructure and they are giving us good stability and performance.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for just about everything in my company. Our use cases stem from three-tier applications up through cloud deployments, Kubernetes, containers, etc. Prior to this, I worked in an enterprise as a Linux engineer.

Being able to onboard faster is definitely an advantage to other Linux systems. In the enterprise, we had an onshore and offshore model. Our offshore model was hard to get onboarded into Linux, even if they said they had Linux experience. There is a big difference between managing one or two systems in your basement to managing a fleet of Linux systems, and that does not always translate over. Having a Linux system that has a cockpit with it where you can give someone a GUI, even though the engineers do not really use it, helps onboard new people into the enterprise, into their jobs, and into their roles a lot faster.

We have a lot of really smart people. They are constantly figuring out ways to do things better and faster with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The openness of it and the ability to create whatever we want to create or have to create to make our actual job easier has given our operations people more time to focus on the things they need to focus on, and not the nitty-gritty of the operating system. Tuning becomes super easy. It is scriptable. It is easy to automate. That gives them all the time back in their day to be able to go solve cool problems and not infrastructure problems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development. All of our developers get their own developer environment, and that is all based on containers and some version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It depends on what they are at and what they are doing. So, we build and give it to them. They are up and running, and they just go. We have some legacy guys who are still helping our customers with older versions. Those people exist. I talked to someone earlier who still has a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 deployment out there.

When it comes to security and compliance, I like firewalld to do things at the host level and to complement what we are doing out in the enterprise with next-gen firewalls and things like that. I have had SELinux enabled on my systems and in my enterprises since it was available. It was a little bit of a learning curve, but it has helped to keep our systems as secure as possible. It complements well with what security groups are doing for the rest of the enterprise.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is great for keeping our organization agile. It is fantastic. We can run them on-prem. We can run them in the cloud. We can move them wherever we need them at the time. If something has to go to the edge for any reason, such as a bandwidth issue or an on-prem issue in the data center, we can push those workloads out. We could push all those containers to where they need to run and when we need to run them. It is super easy to do.

I have not used Red Hat Insights for long, but when I was a Red Hat Insights user, it was the first place I stopped to see what was going on and be able to quickly address and fix issues that Red Hat Insights found.

Red Hat Insights provided us with vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance. In terms of their effect on our uptime, we were able to plan our maintenance windows around what we were seeing in Red Hat Insights. We had the visibility and the ability to go in and plan things out. We could plan what needs to be done and then make that change and say, "This is what we are doing. Here is the playbook for it. We are going to run this in tonight's maintenance window." That prevented us from having to take machines down during the day because we found something critical at that time.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that are most valuable to me, both in the enterprise and now as a partner, are the enterprise features. We are able to have a Linux system that is open-source and that allows us to do domain trust IBM and all that fun stuff. We have a good solid enterprise Linux.

It is not broken. Linux is Linux. It has been since Torvalds created the kernel back in version one of the kernel. We have added more features. More things have come to Linux and kernel. All the AI stuff is a bunch of buzzwords. In the keynote today at the Red Hat summit, Chris Wright talked about lightspeed coming to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What do we need that for? What are we doing with AI? Just the stability of it is fine. If anything cool comes out, I will be the first to check it out. It is a stable platform. It is a workhorse, and that is how we use it.

However, there should be training materials for new enterprises that do not cost an arm and a leg. Red Hat training is phenomenal, but it is expensive. There has to be a better way to onboard new engineers into Linux to really and truly compete with Microsoft. Microsoft is just easy. Everyone uses it. You have to use it in school, and you have to use it everywhere. From an onboarding perspective, we can improve and have an affordable training solution for someone who might not want to be an RHCE or an RHCA but still needs to do their job. It is not Linux's fault. It is what it is. It is a workhorse. It does its thing, but we can do better to enable customers to utilize Linux better.

I have been using it since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. It has been about 20 years.

It is super stable. When Red Hat comes out with lightspeed or integrates SELinux, there are no huge rollbacks. Once it makes it downstream in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you know that is going to work. Everything has bugs, and we get that, but we know it is going to work. We know that nothing terrible is going to happen to our production environment, so stability is fantastic.

We can roll out more machines if we need more machines. We pull machines back if we do not need them anymore. One of the things that is lacking is that currently, there is no way to have ephemeral Linux instances for compliance month or your audit month. If you have to bring up a hundred machines, you have to pay for that upfront. That might be changing now, but in terms of scalability, that is a detriment to how smaller organizations can operate. Not everyone can absorb that cost. It is very scalable, but the pricing is a little prohibitive for scalability.

Their support is awesome. Their TAMs are awesome. The technical support that you get is awesome. There is the ability to attach yourself to bigger customers. When you are a small enterprise and you have an issue, you sometimes filter to the bottom of that list because there are other way-bigger customers who are way louder than some of the smaller ones. Being able to talk to your team and ask how to get a problem fixed is phenomenal. They are able to look at the backend and go, "Oh, there is a large telco that is having the same problem. I am going to add you to that one." From a customer service standpoint and tech support specifically, engineering has been fantastic.

The ability to talk to the people out in the community who work for Red Hat and maintain all of that, from the open-source side and the closed-source side, is amazing. A lot of people do not realize that they can jump on Slack or other platforms, and they can talk to the guys who are responsible for it and figure out what is going on. Sometimes, they ask to open a case, and other times, they say that they know and they are fixing it. Having that accessibility is amazing. You cannot call Microsoft and ask them to let you talk to the engineer who made X, Y, or Z.

Positive

I have been using Red Hat for 25 years.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux everywhere. We are using it on-prem. We call it the fourth cloud, so we have our own cloud like every enterprise does. They might realize that or not. We are using it everywhere. We have it at the edge, in the cloud, on-prem, and hybrid. It is the whole nine yards.

Our deployment strategy is to make it work and get it out there fast. We use all three cloud providers: GCP, Azure, and AWS.

Its deployment is super easy. Once you know what you need, rolling out Red Hat Enterprise Linux is super simple. You just go and repeat until you need to change something and then you change it.

We are using OpenShift to deploy Linux containers for a virtualization competitor migration. We are using it to migrate workloads from that vendor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so we have Linux running in containers to do their virtualization. We are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux containers as well for some workloads, but for the bootable container aspects of it, we essentially have a VM. This is how we use it there, and then everything else is pure containerization. It is not Red Hat Enterprise Linux-specific.

We take care of the deployment for customers. 

When I was in the enterprise, we did not take external help. We did all of that in-house.

We have seen an ROI but not specifically with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the workhorse. Everything else that supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux is where you get your ROI. When you take Ansible, you start automating all of your configurations. You take Insights, and you are getting those playbooks to remediate security issues and all that fun stuff. That is where you get a return on your investment. That is where you see your engineering dollars go down and they can focus on other aspects of the business. That is not specific to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is the whole ecosystem.

I have had sales folks who have been transparent with the pricing, and then I have had other ones who were not as great. Most of those ones that were not as great are not working for Red Hat anymore.

From a pricing perspective, there is supportability. What you get with that support is the ability to open a case before you do something. You can tell them that you are going to be upgrading your Satellite system or all Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems and that you need a case open. They open a case, and then when the day comes, they are there. They are ready, and they know what is going on. The price point for that is phenomenal because you are paying for support. From a pricing perspective, it is on point. It is definitely a value-add, and it is extremely transparent from a customer standpoint.

I have evaluated other solutions. Manageability is the main difference. I have successfully ripped out other solutions in enterprises that I went to and replaced them with Red Hat. They had large fleets and no centralized management. When you come to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you have the Red Hat Satellite server. You have Red Hat Insights. You have all of those things that help you manage large fleets and a large number of Linux machines. When you evaluate other solutions, they have some centralized management now, but that was not common previously. It is kind of a hodgepodge. They are stitched together with all these other solutions, but it does not make sense. In one case, they jammed Linux into their management platform used to manage databases, and it did not work. How do you manage a thousand machines on some busted piece of management software?

If a colleague is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they should go for something based on the use case. They have to look at what they are trying to do and what they want to do. They can get away with Fedora, for instance, but the question for me always comes down to supportability. Do they want to be able to call someone and say, "This is broken. Help. Hurry," or do they have the skills in-house to do that? Most companies do not have those skills. They have one or two very good engineers, but they cannot fix everything at the same time. If they want portability, then they should not look somewhere else. They should go to Red Hat Enterprise Linux because they have the Red Hat name behind it.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten. There is always room for improvement in a product. Tens are unicorns. No one gets a ten. Maybe if Jesus made an operating system, he would get a ten.

My primary use case for it is to run Jenkins servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is critical for our operations. We use it for all of our Linux servers. 

It works. It's consistent. It's well-documented. These are valuable aspects to me. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 updates the Cipher Suites and the security proceeds it. I wasn't pleasantly surprised because a bunch of our server communication didn't work. Having the Cipher Suites updated is a good thing but was not convenient.

I feel positive about the built-in security features when it comes to simplifying the risk and reduction and maintaining compliance. I'm also a Windows Server administrator so, compared to my Windows Server experience, I have very positive feelings about Red Hat Enterprise Linux security based on how easy it is to keep things patched, up-to-date, and compliant.

Some of the repositories and some of the DNS versions are very old. I just deployed something using Ruby and the DNS stable repository was sufficiently old that the Ruby project I was using didn't work. 

I would like more transparency and better options other than using something like Ruby Version Manager. I'd rather be able to get modern, up-to-date versions from the base repositories.

We have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ten years. We're on a bunch of different versions. We're anywhere between version six and nine. My personal project is on nine.

We still have Windows servers.  

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very resource-intensive, and it's hard to secure because Windows, the base use case, is all things to all people. 

I generally like Linux server products. I like the way they specialize, and I like the default security posture.

We have a hybrid environment. We do have some things in the cloud. We're using both Azure and AWS as our cloud providers.

I was involved in the process of migrating our Jenkins servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. It was not straightforward or complex because we changed a lot of things about our deployment. We tried to improve and streamline, and in the process, we broke some of our pipelines. 

It was not smooth, but that was not necessarily because of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, except for some of the security upgrades. We could not use the old RSA keys that we were using with RHEL 6 with RHEL 9. This meant that we either had to loosen our security by allowing legacy keys or tighten things down. We chose to tighten things down.

Another challenge is that we have some old Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications that are running on very old versions. We are trying to get everything off of RHEL 6 and 7 and onto RHEL 9, but there are a few applications that are stuck on RHEL 6 for various reasons.

We are getting rid of all of our Linux servers, so the biggest challenge right now is migrating our applications to RHEL 9.

When it comes to provisioning and patching, it is pretty manual. The company uses VMware, and the process is pretty manual and involves a certain number of shell scripts. I know we're trying to adopt Ansible, but we're not very far along.

I've had a very positive experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. My only point of comparison is Ubuntu, which I use for personal projects. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a solid enterprise product with a greater emphasis on security. However, Ubuntu Server is easier to use in many ways compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This may just be a matter of familiarity, but I find it easier to get current versions of Ruby with Ubuntu than with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

This is based on my somewhat limited use, but it's my impression nonetheless. That's what keeps it from being a ten out of ten.

All our infrastructure uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Every service we run is all Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Even containerization is on it.

It has improved our organization. It has standardized processes. Everyone uses it. 

The upgrades are straightforward which helps when you want to move a major version of an upgrade. It's done in a standard way.

Everything we do is all Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux's security has been good because I have never seen any application going down due to security reasons. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables us to achieve security standard certification. For example, we have a very tightly SCC-regulated company so there are many rules that we are to follow and we are able to achieve this using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I have been using it for six years. 

We are all on-prem, but we also have some footprints in AWS but those images are also on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has supported our hybrid cloud strategy. We have a few things running on AWS. We have a few things on OpenShift. We are able to get all the basic images. It is easy to start and deploy anywhere.

One thing I like is the updates because when we patch it and upgrade it, we save a lot of time doing those upgrades and migrations.

Moreover, upgrades or migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux have been straightforward in some ways. For example, we are currently migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and we have all our servers running on RHEL 7. We have scripts that are very easy to migrate.

For our implementation strategy, we go environment by environment. We start with our development environment. Once we are done with it, we test it. We have some automation test suites, test them, and we go to the upper environment.  

We worked directly with Red Hat for the deployment. We are already working on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 migration. Every year, whenever there is a major version release, we migrate to the major version.  

We see a return on investment in terms of saving time. One thing I like is the updates because when we patch it and upgrade it, we save a lot of time doing those upgrades and migrations.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.