Comment by avhception | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avhception | Hacker News Reader

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I (and by association, the company I work for) have been a CentOS user and was very unhappy when that was taken away, of course!

But It's not necessarily about the money. We're no big enterprise, we're a bunch of small onlineshops and a few other operations. I'd be very happy for my employer to toss RedHat some coins. We're not stupid, I know that for RedHat to stay around they need money. I'm also a big open source advocate, so I'd be more than happy.

But how do you even do that without involving a lot of overhead? DigitalOcean, our infrastructure provider, doesn't even offer any paid Linux. You pay for the VM and that's it. As far as I know, it's the same for AWS, Azure and what-have-you.

RedHat needs to rethink their business model, maybe partner with these providers so they get a cut of the price from DigitalOcean. I'd be more than happy about that, heck, you could even include a small contingent of support tickets with the VM. Maybe a cheap CentOS VM w/o support and a slightly more expensive RedHat VM. I could definitely have used that at some points!

So, RedHat, please - take our money!

You can pretty easily install whatever you want on whatever cloud provider you want if you have an actual VM you access. If that's outside of your capability, you shouldn't be using a VM.

That said, there are providers that will sell you paid for OSes for a monthly extra fee. They're just not US technology giants :)

Well, I didn't say I can't roll my own images. I said it's too much overhead. You loose a lot of the integration that the cloud provider has already baked into their images, you have to deal with RedHats subscription manager and sales department etc.

What I want is an easy "20$/month CentOS, 24$/month RedHat" offer where all of that is taken care of.

Some providers, eg, GCP, have this already. Red Hat Enterprise Linux[1] is available, as is Ubuntu Pro[2] and Rocky Linux[3]. Red Hat and DO need to speak to each other.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/partners/google

[2] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/ubuntu-pro-av...

[3] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-moderniza...

this 100% when we are already paying for hosting, paying a bit more for something like redhat is a no-brainer.

I can image my own VM, but I don't necessarily want to image my own VM, especially when I'm in something of a rush or I just want something vanilla.

This is the big appeal of e.g. AWS Linux. If I want a VM I can get one in about three clicks and 60 seconds. Sure, it won't be as custom-configured as I want it, but it's an over-generalisation to say that if you can't image a VM you shouldn't use one. Plenty of dev folk out there expert in Ruby/Java/whatever that wouldn't know where to start. I can't do even basic mechanics, does that mean I shouldn't be allowed to drive?

The AWS model is great because they just roll the license costs into the VM cost. It makes me budgeting things easier, and more importantly means when I'm on AWS I don't have to handle the BS which is software license management.

If he were to do everything himself (regardless whether or not he can do them),then there is no point of choosing Redhat over other Linux distros.

The raison d'etre of RedHat is to take away Linux problems from users' concern.

What you say about installing OS as long as you have full access is true.

But I wonder, could digital ocean make it easier? Does redhat provide VM images in which you only have to enter license key, or is the process more complicated (e.g. you have to get these images from a paywalled url?)

AWS offers instances with RHEL for a higher rate.

Good to know, I'll definitely look into that should we ever change to AWS (unlikely in the near future)

There is actually a whole AWS marketplace for AMIs, with subscriptions and support (often) bundled in.

I've not used it for RHEL, etc, but I've used it for appliance-style images.

Rocky Linux should be bug-for-bug compatible with CentOS, IIRC to turn a CentOS machine into a Rocky Linux machine you only need to update the dnf mirrors settings

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