I’ve come across Red Hat allot lately and am wondering if I need to get studying. I’m an avid Ubuntu server user but don’t want to get stuck only knowing one distro. What is the way to go if i want to know as much as I can for use in real world situations.
100% sure its Debian.
Mission critical server mostly are RHEL or EL Clone or Fedora or it’s derivative… If you combine even Azure nowdays, Microsoft Linux is derived from Fedora, same as Amazon Linux, and others… Debian are covering some part, but mostly hobbyist, or SME, and mostly non critical, as they don’t have standard across, even on their https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended and https://www.debian.org/consultants/
apt also bad when you got to dowgrade package when something mess up, and get messy with dpkg… :'(
So I quite doubt if it’s production env, mostly go with EL. I do know some company use Ubuntu/Debian, but it’s quite few…
If Ubuntu/Debian want to shape Industries, and kick out RHEL, they need to have standard, and better consultancy than RHEL. I hope so that they could grow and make market competitive, but for now it isn’t sadly.
Debian needs to focus more on automation if they want more penetration in the enterprise. Debian feels made for human admins logging in and managing things old school style which is fine for a few machines. Modern enterprises use Ansible etc and need highly functional non-interactive ways to install and configure etc. Preseed and Apt leave something to be desired here.
What has automation to do with a distro? You can automate any distro. Ansible runs on any linux.
A distro can make automation more difficult than it needs to be. As I mentioned in my examples, Preseed sucks, have you ever used it? And of course Ansible works on pretty much any distro, but Debian family distros are made with the expectation of user input, such as expecting configuration values during package installation and this has to be worked around. It’s not impossible, just more work and testing. When you’re automating CentOS and Ubuntu next to each other, you’ll realize extra Ubuntu related code.
Not a big deal, it’s just minor preferences.
Any examples? I never installed such a package.