Why Prompt Uncomfortable Questions
Published: 2023-04-11 19:27:01

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title: Why Prompt Uncomfortable Questions
published: true
date: 2023-03-08 16:08:00 UTC
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canonical_url: https://thjones2.blogspot.com/2023/03/why-prompt-uncomfortable-questions.html
---

I do automation work for a number of enterprise customers. Each of these customers deploys Red Hat and Red Hat derivatives in their hosting environments (be those environments physical, on-premises virtualized or "in the cloud"). Basically, they use "for real" Red Hat for their production systems, then use one of the free clones for the development efforts …until the CentOS 8 Core → CentOS 8 Stream debacle, they used Centos for the development efforts. My focus with such customers is almost always constrained to their cloud-hosted Enterprise Linux hosts.

However, due to that CentOS 8 Stream debacle, one of my customers fell for Oracle's "use OL8: it's free" come-on. Now, if you've been in IT for even five minutes, you realize that anything "free" offered by Oracle is only so offered because Oracle sees it as a foot in the door. That said, with OL8, specifically, they try to add features to it to make it "a more compelling offering" (or something). Unfortunately, to date, the deltas between OL8 and RHEL8 are significantly greater than between RHEL8 and Rocky 8 or Alma 8 ...and not for the better. Automation that my team has written that "just works" for creating RHEL 8, Rocky 8 and Alma 8 AMIs and VM-templates doesn't "just work" for creating OL8 AMIs.

For example, while Rocky 8, Alma 8 and CentOS 8 Stream (and CentOS 8 Core, before it) all know how to do weak dependency resolution, OL8 doesn't (or, at least, didn't until _maybe_ recently: a couple months after reporting the issue to Oracle via their bugzilla, they finally sent back a notification saying the problem's fixed, I just haven't had the opportunity to verify).

At any rate, each time I've run into various brokenness within OL8, the customer's Oracle sales team keeps trying to sell support contracts.

Similarly, when trying to tout the value of OL8, they tried to flog OL8's ksplice feature. When I asked "why would I use that when RHEL 8 and all of its non-Oracle derivatives have kpatch", the Oracle rep responded back with a list of things that ksplice is able to do but kpatch isn't. That said, the wording of his response elicited a "but you also seem to be saying that feature isn't in the free edition" response from me. Eventually, the representative replied back saying that my assessment was accurate – the flogged feature wasn't in the free edition.

He also tried to salvage the "Oracle support" thread by pointing out that Oracle would also provide support for my customer's Red Hat systems under an uber-contract. Now, my customer uses pay as you go (PAYG) EC2s in AWS but wanted free EL8 alternatives – thus the consideration of OL8 – for their non-production workloads. As such, if they're doing PAYG RHEL instances and wanting free OL8 for their non-production workloads, why would suggesting my customer buy Oracle's support for all of them make any sense? I mean, if my customer were not doing PAYG RHEL instances, they've presumably bought instance-licenses (and support along with it) from Red Hat, so, again, "why am would they want to buy Oracle's support for them"

…similarly, if they're already doing static licensing for RHEL instances, then they're probably also managing their instance-licenses through Satellite (etc.). As such, they'd then be able to take advantage of the "free for developers" licenses for their non-production EC2s …at which point the question would be "why would they even bother with OL8" let alone have to ask the "why would we buy Oracle's support for them" question?

 

Yeah, I get that Oracle sees OL8 more as a foot-in-the-door than an actual product, but still: send me information that doesn't beg questions that are going to be uncomfortable for you to answer.