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by adql 917 days ago
> I don't want to say Linux is free, in practice it's not, those who are running the big powerful machines are using RHEL and paying hefty licenses.

Google/Amazon/MS isn't paying RHEL licenses.

Reason for using RHEL is basically "we don't want to hire experts", which makes a lot of sense in small/midsized company but in big one it's probably mostly the ability to blame someone else if something is fucked up, and the fact some of the software basically says "run it on this distro or it is unsupported".
2 comments
deafpolygon 917 days ago
That's basically it. As a sysadmin, I supported over hundreds of Linux servers (mostly virtual) pretty much by myself. We paid the license so that if the shit hit the fan (and we really had no way of fixing it) we can call on Red Hat. At least, I could be able to tell my bosses that things were being handled.

This never happened, of course. But it's CYA.

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ElijahLynn 917 days ago
I've used RHEL support too, believe it or not, while working as a DevOps engineer at Red Hat on www.redhat.com. And the support specialist assigned to my issue was very sharp and solved the issue quickly. Easy in hindsight but I was stuck so I reached out, and I was glad I did. It involved a segfault and grabbing a core dump and analyzing it. ++Red Hat Support
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trelliscoded 916 days ago
A product I worked on got real popular, so scaling up the support department became a real pain since the devs were running all kinds of different distros and so we had CI and package support for Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS... except that all of those come in a bunch of different variants and customers expected the product to run on them. At one point more than 90% of the tickets were dealing with distribution-specific weirdness. There was an epic internal wiki page that must have weighted in at a couple megabytes of raw text that was an encyclopedia of run-time linker caveats for hundreds of distributions, complete with troubleshooting flowcharts and links to our internal test farm to get one-click access to a VM reproducing the scenario described. I still wish I had that, it would have been so handy for some of the Rust and MIPS porting I'm doing now.

We couldn't containerize it (it's a client for a security monitor), we couldn't ship it as a VM, so eventually we all agreed to ditch everything except RHEL and everyone else would be unsupported (we grandfathered all the existing ones in, and it took a year and a half before everything worked.).

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