External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
I provide consultation to clients for their mission-critical applications. Its primary use case is running containers and microservices on Springboard.
My customers use versions 7.2 or 7.3. I have used versions 8.2 and 8.4. I have tried version 9, but I use version 8.4 specifically because it supports HighPoint RAID for storing the data, whereas the client applications run on the much lower version.
There are benefits in terms of price, security, and stability to reduce the risk of applications going down or something like that. A vast majority of systems are on Red Hat Enterprise Linux than on other distributions, which is another benefit.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps to achieve security standards certification. They use it in the PCI DSS segment, so it enables the applications to be compliant with all these security aspects.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very stable. It has been in the market for many years, and it is used by large organizations.
Their documentation and knowledge base are valuable. As an individual developer, whenever I have problems, it is easy to find the information. Their knowledge base is seamlessly integrated with the software. Whenever I have a question, it directly takes me to the knowledge base. It is well documented.
It supports scripting very well. Everything is scripted. A snapshot is taken in the VM, and the script is applied. It lends itself to better security and governance processes.
Its installation on a RAID or cluster system is something difficult. There are specific teams working on that. The GRUB configuration is also a little different from the other Linux distributions.
In terms of additional features, as technology keeps evolving, the product will also have to evolve. For example, Microsoft Windows has come a long way. In Windows 11, there are so many features that are fundamentally the same as the oldest version, but there are other aspects or processes that have improved. macOS has also evolved over time. Similarly, in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux that I used in 2003 and the one that I am using now, some things are the same and some things have changed. Red Hat can continue to engage clients, understand the use cases, and update them.
I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2002 or 2003. Red Hat has a vast variety of products. I have only been using Red Hat's operating system. I have not used Red Hat's other products.
It is very stable.
It is scalable, but I do not have experience in building hundreds of systems on a VM.
I have not used their technical support at all. I only use their documentation portal for self-support. Our production support team interacts with Red Hat's support team.
As a developer, I use both SUSE as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. My personal preference is Gentoo, but no one runs Gentoo on a production system. Gentoo is better in terms of customization. You can choose what you want.
I am not directly involved in its deployment, but I am planning to build an application. At that time, I will be deploying it myself. In the organization where I work as a consultant, there is a segregation of roles. There is a production support team, there is a development team, and there is a DevOps team. I am a part of the development team.
Its initial setup is straightforward. It is not complex. It also depends on the architecture, high availability, etc.
In terms of deployment, earlier, it was on-prem, but now, it is on the cloud. My client runs about 150 VMs on the cloud in the production, staging, and QA environments. Most of the things have been consolidated into VMs. The migration is complete. It was not that complex.
I have not measured that, but it should pay back for itself easily. The ROI should be reasonable. The cost over a period of time should be minuscule. As compared to other OSs, it is better to go with a big, known, and trusted vendor.
As a developer, I pay around 10,000 Yen, which is around $100 per annum for support. SUSE and Red Hat are typically the same without standard support. The pricing is not a big deal. Enterprise customers will pay for the support. Enterprises have the money for one or two products like this that are reliable and supported.
As a consultant, I advise customers to go for support. You mitigate risks by having support. For your personal usage, you can manage without support, but when it comes to the enterprise level, you need to delegate things to people, and it should be through the proper channel. You need a proper point of contact.
I would advise following the best practices recommended by Red Hat. It will minimize the downtime of the application or system. Partner with the vendor and get that support. Know the business case and build a strong relationship with the vendor. Trust them and tell them your use case, and they will come up with the best solution possible.
I am not a big authority on Red Hat or other Linux or Unix products. Only recently, I have been exposed to the concept called hardening and penetration testing. I do not know whether Red Hat provides a hardened version of the OS. My basic distribution is Gentoo which provides a hardened version of Linux. On the client side, the organizations we work with have different departments, such as the security department and the compliance department. For security, they work with various options that are available. For penetration testing, we engage a penetration testing consultancy company once a year.
Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten.
We are running databases and applications on it. We are also using the Squid proxy server, NGINX, and Apache, so we are running multiple services on the servers.
We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux eight and nine. We also use Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Ansible Tower.
I've mostly worked with the telcos and banking sectors, and they mostly have on-prem setups. We do have a hybrid environment where we have multiple machines running on AWS. I am based in Saudi, where they are using another cloud called Din. They are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Din as well.
Their trainings should be free.
It's more stable than the other operating systems. That's why everyone is using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform instead of Windows on the server side.
They regularly send us updates regarding patches and security vulnerabilities. We patch our servers quarterly. Mostly, we do patching every three months. They always send us updates on our official email, so it's quite good.
I've been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for five to six years. I have only been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux over these years.
Its stability is quite good. I'd rate it a nine out of ten.
I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability. It's being used in the banking center, and they are running their applications and databases on it.
We have LVM configurations, so according to the application, we can increase the disk size. The environment is quite good for my use.
Their support is quite good, and they're responsive, but they first send us to the platform to check the issues. They don't provide direct support immediately. For a new engineer, it can be quite difficult. It would be good if they put us directly on the call in case of an emergency.
Some of the newer engineers require support in a quick manner. Those of us who have experience of six to seven years don't require the support, but in the beginning, we required support, and their support was quite good.
Positive
The product selection depends on the company. Telco companies have the budget, and they are using licensed products, whereas small companies usually use the free versions of Linux. They go for Oracle Linux, CentOS, etc.
We are using CentOS and Ubuntu on some of the machines. The company wanted to go for a free product, but I told them that for any support in the future, we need a licensed product, and they are now migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
It's best in terms of security features. We configure the templates and then we implement the CIS controls, security features, and complete patching of the server.
In terms of maintenance, Red Hat provides us with the details about the security vulnerabilities, and the engineer needs to implement all the security on the servers.
We did it on our own.
We haven't seen an ROI.
From a management point of view, it's quite good, but everyone is complaining that it's more expensive than the other operating systems.
Overall, I'd rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten.
I'm a consultant, and our customers use this product. I work for a company that works with this product. I mostly work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We do designs of infrastructure projects from the bottom to the top. We install Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the system level. Based on the application requirements, we design, configure, and update the systems.
Our customers use it as a basic operating system on which they deploy applications. They have enterprise application servers such as Tomcat or custom applications that need an operating system.
I've worked with it both on-prem and on the cloud. It depends on the client. On the cloud, the cloud providers are both AWS and Azure. This also depends on the clients, but it's mostly AWS and Azure.
Mostly, our customers use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of its performance and security. They want to have an operating system that is supported and secure because they don't want to spend too much time supporting a Linux version that is not enterprise. They want an enterprise product that is secure so that they don't have to think about it all the time.
It isn't difficult for our customers to move workloads between the cloud and the data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The integration from on-prem to the cloud is quite easy because the operating system is the same. The operating system works the same in both places, so it's easy.
It has helped our customers avoid cloud vendor lock-in because they didn't need to buy a specific subscription from a cloud vendor or use a specific operating system from a cloud vendor and change the code of their application in relation to that. It's important to have a solution that avoids cloud vendor lock-in because they can move freely from one system to another system without any issues.
It has saved costs for our customers because it's a stable operating system, and they have no problem with security, patching, and so on. The operating system and the environment are stable. It works everywhere without any issues, so the development of the applications is not impacted by the system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is easy to use and well-supported.
Support is most valuable. If a customer has a problem with a feature or a bug, we can open a support case for that, and the issue is resolved or taken care of. That's the main benefit of the product.
The resiliency of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is quite good.
Some low-level aspects, such as the file system support, can be improved. There are a lot of file systems that are supported by other Linux distributions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a little behind those. For example, BTRFS is a file system that is not supported by Red Hat.
Some of our customers use the image builder tool to build the golden image to deploy to the cloud or to build a custom image to deploy on the cloud or on-prem. The golden image created by the image builder tool is good. It's the golden image. It works without any issues. However, the build process of image builder could be improved because it's not up to the standard or at par with other tools that build the golden image. However, it's quite useful and quite easy to use. It's not a big problem, but it could be improved. There is not a lot of information about how to use it. The process is not as well documented as the other parts of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The knowledge base offered by Red Hat is very good, but it could be improved and made much easier to search. Currently, the best way to find an article in the knowledge base is by using Google Search. By searching on Google, we can find the right knowledge base article, but it isn't easy to find information by using the search option within the knowledge base.
I've been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the last four years.
It's very stable. I didn't have any issues with the stability of the product most of the time.
Its scalability is very good. It scales very well in the right infrastructure.
Their support is good. It's one of the best support in the IT world for a product because you always get a response for every bug or issue. Overall, I'd rate their support a nine out of ten.
Positive
They were using Ubuntu.
It's straightforward. It's pretty easy to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It can be difficult based on the workflow of the client, but overall, it's pretty straightforward to deploy on the cloud environment because all cloud providers support the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The golden image of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is compatible with every cloud provider. There is a feature in the cloud console for joining the Red Hat Enterprise Linux account with the cloud account, so you can create cloud images from the console. It's pretty easy from that.
Our customers have seen an ROI because after they choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they stay with the product and renew the subscription. It's a good investment for the IT department.
Its licensing is pretty confusing. There are a lot of subscriptions, and it isn't always clear which subscription is the best, but with their support, it's easy to find the right one.
Our customers sometimes buy it directly from the cloud provider, but most of the time, they have a hybrid infrastructure, so they already have some kind of subscription, and they use that subscription on the cloud.
We evaluated other options, but other options don't provide the support and stability that come with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
To someone who is looking at open source cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would say that if they are looking for an enterprise OS on a cloud environment and they want to have some stability and security, Red Hat is the perfect match for that.
Overall, I'd rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten.
Most of our servers are low latency, and it's easier to have low latency applications run on Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux's installation is easy. We don't have to reboot Red Hat Enterprise Linux like Windows, where there are a bunch of system updates that you have to do. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is just easier to manage.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux's most valuable feature is its stability.
We would like to have a better understanding of what to expect when we move to a different version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
A latency always gets introduced when we move to newer Red Hat versions. I wish we wouldn't see that as often as we do nowadays. It would be nice to know the changes upfront rather than when we have to open a case, go through a couple of months, and then find a good resolution. We want a better understanding of what we will see when we update the kernel from seven to eight.
I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 15 years.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a pretty stable solution. Its stability is a lot better than most other operating systems.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux's scalability is better than other competitors.
For the most part, Red Hat Enterprise Linux's support has been really good. Most of the time, we've had to escalate it to get a good response.
Neutral
Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s initial setup is pretty straightforward.
Whenever we see a compliance issue and need a patch, it's been relatively easy to get Red Hat Enterprise Linux to update it.
We have a mix of Windows and Linux. Around 80 percent of our systems are Red Hat, but we also have Windows. So it depends on the application.
Most applications are compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's easier to tune on a Red Hat system than on another OS. We could pin applications to a core with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In terms of tuning, Red Hat Enterprise Linux performs better in the long run.
Overall, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten.
We use the product as our server's operating system.
The enterprise support of the product is valuable to us. When stuff gets difficult, it's nice to have somebody to ask about it.
The solution should be updated more with the releases of programming languages. They’re lagging a bit too much. We have a lot of developers complaining about having releases that are too old. For example, if they want Python 3.11, Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports only 3.9. So the product is lagging behind a bit more than our developers would like.
It would be nice if all the features that are available on the cloud, like Image Builder and Insight, would be available on-prem.
I have been using the solution for five years.
The product is very, very stable and tested. It is like everybody tested everything for five years, and every problem was fixed.
We have never had a problem with the solution’s scalability. We have around 6000 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers in versions 7, 8, and 9.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a lot better compared to all other products. I rate the support an eight or a nine out of ten. There's too much information on the support page sometimes. If we log in to the support pages and try to find information, it's hard to get what we're searching for.
Positive
We had a lot of different Linux distributions. The pros of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are that it's the same platform for everybody, and it works for everybody. If you need something very special, you might get issues in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but you can work around it.
The biggest issue with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is mostly the old packages. It is a con if you have something that you know is a bug that hasn't really been released in Red Hat Enterprise Linux but has been released in the other products.
We do a template, and then we just use it. It's quite great.
We take 30 minutes to deploy the solution. It depends on the size of the machine.
I am using versions 7, 8, and 9. By implementing the solution, we wanted a unified server with a baseline platform that everybody uses. We wanted to have just one server that is enterprise ready.
We do not really have compliances in the same way as an American company has. It's nice to have IT security personnel. You get SELinux from the start. However, we get a lot of support cases because of it. The developers face problems with it. So, we get the security, but we also get lots of support cases. Usually, I end up in the middle of that because I work with support.
We run containers on OpenShift. We run only one platform, so portability isn't a concern. We only have Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift. We don't really need portability since we are government agencies. Nothing else other than on-prem is allowed for us.
The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extensive. It is a bit hard to find information. However, when you find it, it's good. The packages are a bit old. We have a bit of an issue because of that. But other than that, it's a great operating system.
Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.