CIQ Unveils a Version of Rocky Linux for the Enterprise

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greybeardthegeek@reddit

Rocky Linux from CIQ is now available with an annual flat-rate subscription price of $25,000/year.

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25k isn't a bad deal depending on your environment. I don't know how much we were paying for RHEL at my previous gig, but it wasn't cheap and we migrated most stuff to CentOS to save money. Across 6 environments, we had upwards of probably 5k hosts, most running CentOS and RHEL.

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CautiousAssistance@reddit

5k hosts? No enterprise support? Wow.. That's amazing..

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darthgeek@reddit

We had support. We "saved money" by not having to pay to license a RHEL host. And at the time, RedHat's policy about VMs was that the mere existence of a RHEL host on a hypervisor was cause for a higher support price tag. So we basically kept all the RHEL hosts on one hypervisor at a time so we only had to license one hypervisor.

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CautiousAssistance@reddit

No need to be defensive about licensing, Yoz this is Reddit.. I am coming more from the point of 5k-ish centos, since u already mentioned that you only have one hypervisor running rhel.. Either your ops team is so strong with centos or your company doesn’t care (at 5k vm I don’t think so)

Coz apart from using the os, tons of things came with the eco system, like satellite, ansible. Most have upstream alternatives but like I mentioned the team must be so technical.

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darthgeek@reddit

Not defensive, explanatory. We had Satellite and used chef. The env was pretty stable. Most of the hosts ran the company's in-house developed software. There were a lot of moving pieces to it, hence the high number of hosts. It was eventually largely self-service too, after we migrated to a hyper converged environment running vRealize. That was a lot of work, but it was really cool. Some dev needs to spin up a few boxes to test something? Just login to the portal, select what you want (Pilot, Production, Sandbox, etc), provide some information, and within 10-15 minutes, you'd have your hosts ready to go, fully patched, logins already working, etc.

The team I was on had several hundred years of experience combined. It was the best place I've worked for. I miss it all the time.

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CautiousAssistance@reddit

Cool.. i love strong technical teams..

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darthgeek@reddit

It truly was one of the best teams I've ever worked with. Everyone on the team either got laid off or works elsewhere now. But we still have a group chat on Google Chat (or whatever they're calling it this minute) where we keep in touch.

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syncdog@reddit

And I'm sure you all your support cases were for problems encountered on the RHEL hosts, never on the CentOS ones, right?

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ImpostureTechAdmin@reddit

Why?

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nut-sack@reddit

25k/year for what rocky already releases? CIQ would just be an added layer to do some integration testing. Hardly seems worth it unless im missing something.

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ImpostureTechAdmin@reddit

You're missing the expert engineers that support the product. Software is an automatic no-go without first party support in ~99% of enterprises

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nut-sack@reddit

Never heard of that, seems odd that they would be okay with CentOS, but now its a problem when you want to go Rocky? Back when I worked for a company that ran CentOS on everything, when we had a problem, if a new rpm wasnt made yet, we built the rpms outselves to fix it if it temporarily until an official one was released.
Do you work for CiQ or something?

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ImpostureTechAdmin@reddit

I don't work for CiQ.

This package isn't a replacement for CentOS, it's an alternative for rhel. I've been trying to get my company (F500 b2b) to adopt a RHEL alternative for as long as I can remember so we could have extra spend elsewhere. This is like a dream come true, because it checks the "must have first-party (including first party endorsed) support options" and will come in at about 2% of our current RHEL spend. I know we won't migrate everything to it, but it'll still give me enough to start another project that's been on hold for a few years.

I'd love to package stuff myself. Unfortunately we need external first party support because of conditions in our engagement contracts that lower our financial risk in case of failure to serve. The timer stops when we engage first party support (which includes CiQ, in this case).

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nut-sack@reddit

That feels like a pretty specific itch to scratch. But if it works for you, happy to hear it.
In a past gig, if they insisted on a support contract, they were paying for redhat. If they didnt, they were getting CentOS. (this is before all the stream nonsense)
I hadn't seen this in-between before except for extended support on EOL stuff.

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gordonmessmer@reddit

which includes CiQ, in this case

Out of curiosity, why does it include CIQ, when they are not even a "first party" for Rocky Linux, which is developed and published by RESF? They're third-party in every sense.

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gordonmessmer@reddit

You're missing the expert engineers that support the product

I think a lot of people throw the word "support" around without thinking about what it means.

In the context of an enterprise support program, "support" includes, among other things, the ability to fix bugs that affect the customer's systems. Rocky Linux explicitly disavows that kind of support in favor of claims of "bug-for-bug" compatibility with the upstream project. As long as they stick to that, the only kind of "support" Rocky Linux can have is Tier 1 (aka helpdesk) support, which is the least valuable, most superficial form of support.

Too many people misunderstood "bug-for-bug compatible." That was a constraint. It's a bad thing. It wasn't what a downstream distribution should strive for, it was simply the best that the CentOS project could do with the process that existed before CentOS Stream -- before Red Hat published the major-version branch of RHEL.

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ImpostureTechAdmin@reddit

There's multiple meanings of support. You seem to think I mean still receiving security updates and bug patches, but I mean an external escalation point with endorsement from the product creator.

I work for a massive B2B service provider with 'ability to serve' guarantees with financial backing in the range of millions to hundreds of millions for virtually every client. One of the things that stops the timer is engagement with first party support, which includes officially endorsed entities by the product creator. Obviously the suggestion needs to clear legal and the political barrier, but the savings are so great that I think it'd be pretty easy to sell it.

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gordonmessmer@reddit

There's multiple meanings of support

Yes, that's my whole point. An enterprise security contract entails a whole bunch of forms of support. It's not just tier 1 helpdesk, it's the ability to accept and resolve bug and security issues. It's periodic discussions with your account manager to discuss changes that are coming in the product, and discussing your needs to help prioritize and guide the development of the product in the future.

Rocky Linux doesn't provide any of that, because Rocky Linux explicitly does not develop the product. They merely build what is given to them.

If you file a bug report as a Rocky Linux user, there's nowhere to escalate the issue to. They can tell you if you're doing something wrong, but if there is a bug, it can't be escalated and fixed. There is no "escalation point."

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syncdog@reddit

Technically, CIQ doesn't offer first party support. Red Hat is the first party. Any enterprise who falls for this offering will learn that lesson real quick when they make a feature request to CIQ beyond just "rebuild the latest thing Red Hat published".

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