I use the solution in my company for regular servers with databases, load balancers, Apache, and so on.

The benefits of using the product revolve around the fact that it has made it easier to automate everything on it, which includes automating servers and so on.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is an upcoming, more stable product, like Oracle OS. The tool has everything that IBM Red Hat Redbooks has.

In terms of how I would assess the portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for keeping our organization agile and flexible, I would say that since my company is a service provider, we get the containers from the customers, which we don't use for our own selves, but we use Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI) 9 for some things like to to get our own containers and so on.

My company has not tried to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 since we are still using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8. In the future, I am expecting to see Podman 5.0 released for RHEL 9.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for three years.

It is a nice and stable solution. Some problems may occur with the product if you don't patch it after a year or two.

There are no problems with the scalability of the product, as it works fine.

Previously, my company used to use a simple version of RHEL and other tools depending on the needs of our company's customers.

Regarding my experience related to the deployment process, I would say that everything is automated now. You just fill out the survey, and then you just deploy the tool. The product's deployment phase is easy.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The team members can deploy the solution in my company.

If the customer wants to pay for the support and so on, then we can go for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Otherwise, one can go for any other open-source platform. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), you get the latest on everything. If you are running Oracle Linux, it gets hard to find some patches. It is easy to find new things like Podman or Red Hat Subscription-Manager, especially if you want to run something on Oracle OS, then you need to compile the patches yourself.

The product has helped centralize development in our company. In our company, we are mostly automating all the server installations on Red Hat template by filling in IP addresses with Postman.

We don't use the built-in features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance since they are only available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source cloud-based operating systems for Linux other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I would say that previously people preferred CentOS until Red Hat stripped it apart. At the moment, it is like, if you want an RHEL-based tool, it is either Rocky Linux or Oracle OS because I think Fedora is too lenient, while CentOS is somewhere in the middle.

I would be spending the same amount of time on some other solution if I was not using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since everything is automated now, and in such a case, it will just be another image you use on some other product.

My company uses Ansible as a part of the deployment model.

The product is easy to use, and you can get support whenever you want. The solution also   the latest packages, which include Red Hat Subscription-Manager, Podman, Linux, and other such functionalities.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

A lot of our Red Hat operating systems run middle-tier applications. We are mostly a JBoss shop, so they are homegrown applications. They are Java-based. We have several types of applications. We have identity, security, Oracle database, etc.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps with standardization. A lot of middle-tier applications hosted in the data center or in the cloud are unified in one standard operating system, which is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. On the data center side, we only have Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have one unified operating system.

For our containerization projects, we are looking into OpenShift. Our Ansible Automation Platform executioner uses container-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We use Podman. We have moved to the Red Hat Podman container. It is a lot easier. We can scale up easily and manage it. It reduces the security risk. We do not have to worry about patching. We can just image a new container that is up to date. That is great.

We had a situation where we had to create an image for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, and there were built-in playbooks for hardening the system. We were able to run that and create the image. It made the work much easier than it used to be in the past.

Red Hat Insights provides vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance. It has that capability. It has a lot of features built in that not only help with security but also with misconfigurations. If a system is misconfigured, it detects that. It gives you the solution for the problem it captured. It is a great tool, but we have been focusing on the security perspective. We have not been focusing on operating system configurations. I have not yet looked at the new version, but in my opinion, it would be better if Red Hat puts a lot of focus on Insights and take it to the next level where the company could use it for its OS compliance.

We have all types of different versions running in our environment except the obsolete ones. We are moving towards versions 8 and 9. We have had version 7, and it has been very stable until now. It is ending this year around June 30, so we are in the process of moving to version 8, and we have just released an image for version 9. So far, version 8 has also been very stable.

It is a Linux-based operating system. It integrates with our automation base. We have Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Ansible. All the engineers who are a part of our infrastructure or operation on the Unix side are Red Hat Enterprise Linux certified, so it is a lot easier for us to manage and integrate with the tools that we have. It makes much more sense from the middleware perspective and management too.

The bootup time for Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on physical hardware in the data center can be improved. We have seen cloud-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and it is instantaneous. You wait for a few seconds, and the operating system is up and running. It is a lot faster, whereas it takes a very long time when running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on physical hardware.

We used Red Hat Insights, but we are more focused on compliance, patching of operating systems, and things like that. In the past, when we looked at Red Hat Insights, it was its own platform, and then it migrated to Satellite. Companies are struggling to be compliant from the security side. Everyone is focused on how to patch the systems, what the environment looks like, whether they are under 90-day CVE, how their environment is compliant, and where they can see it as a dashboard. I wish Red Hat Insights was focused on that. From the Red Hat perspective, I am not seeing any sessions. I do not see anyone talking about that, which is a huge deal for us. I would like Red Hat Insights to go to the next level where it is focused on patching and compliance.

I do not have any other areas of improvement. It has been stable for us. There is a lot we do in terms of automation and integration. I know Red Hat 8 now has Podman for containers. Cockpit has a UI, so that is good now. That helps with certain things.

We have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for close to 20 years.

We have not run into something that caused a huge problem to our environment. If something is happening, such as it is running an Oracle database and that system has kernel panic or something like that, it is usually the database or application software running on the operating system. It is not the operating system itself.

We have not run into any major infrastructure incident costing us because of the operating system. They have it integrated with all other products such as OpenShift, OpenStack, etc.

We have three data centers at different geographical locations. Two are in the state of Georgia and one is in Las Vegas. In all three data centers that we manage, the compute-based are all Red Hat-based. 

We have a Red Hat TAM, and that helps a lot in terms of the problems and things that we run into. He is the interface with Red Hat. He escalates our service tickets and things like that. That is a huge help from our perspective.

The support that we get directly from putting tickets in has always been great. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is probably the best and most stable product that Red Hat has especially in regards to getting support and getting things fixed. They are on top of that. It has been a great experience. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We used to run Sun Solaris. We were a Sun Solaris shop in the beginning. This was 15 or 20 years ago. We moved because of the Intel-based hardware, licensing, and cost reduction. Moving away from Sun SPARC hardware to Red Hat was a lot of saving. It saved a lot for the company. We can now run Linux-based systems on Intel commodity hardware using Dell.

Its usage is growing. Our team is working with other business units within the enterprise to get them onboarded to the Red Hat-based operating system. We have multiple entities that are running CentOS and Ubuntu. We have to have a standard operating system, and that is Red Hat. Our portfolio is increasing. We are growing and migrating a lot of nonstandard ones to Red Hat.

We have an enterprise technology group that utilizes Oracle Linux. We have worked with OEM. Our team is managing that too.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-prem. We also have a cloud environment, but other teams are using it on the cloud. The cloud provider is AWS. The database team also uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux in AWS.

We use Red Hat Satellite and Ansible for Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployment across all three data centers.

My first deployment experience was almost 30 years ago. I started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or something like that back in 1993 or 1994. There has been a tremendous change in the way you install it and utilize it now. It is night and day. It has come a long way.

We implement it on our own.

Our costs are reduced. We can allocate that OpEx and focus on some other project. We do not have to struggle and say that this is how much we are going to pay licensing just on the operating system cost. We now have a model that works for us.

We are a huge VMware shop. Our licensing cost works well with Red Hat. We license based on the data center. The way our license works is that we can run as many Red Hat VMs as we want and pay for a single license. On the VMware side, we gain a lot, and it makes much more sense.

We did not evaluate other operating systems and compared them with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We just went from Solaris to Red Hat.

We are an agile environment. We practice agile methodology. Anything we manage and deploy has to go through a sprint phase. We do not have a fully containerized environment. In the future, once we adopt OpenShift, it is going to increase our productivity because of how we manage things through agile. It is going to help us a lot.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would say that it all comes down to the company and how a company foresees security. Anything we support and manage has to have a support base. If something gets impacted from the security side, we know that we have Red Hat support, and it is reliable. We can get the patch we want. If you install an application that needs a bug fix, you can reach out to Red Hat and open a ticket. If you want to have a stable environment, then I would highly recommend getting the support and running Red Hat.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.