RHEL has had no significant investment to keep it from becoming irrelevant in the next five years. The datacenter and deployments of linux have changed so rapidly (mostly due to the new centralization and homogeneity of infrastructure investment) that RHELs niche is rapidly shrinking.
Yes also a gray beard and been around long enough to tell you RHEL is and will continue to be legacy and will continue to dwindle into obsolescence. You mentioned the cool stuff Fedora is doing, that is not RHEL. CoreOS is the future.
RHEL Image mode is a new approach for operating system deployment that enables users to create, deploy and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a bootc container image.
This approach simplifies operations across the enterprise, allowing developers, operations teams and solution providers to use the same container-native tools and techniques to manage everything from applications to the underlying OS.
* How is RHEL Image Mode different?
Due to the container-oriented nature, RHEL Image mode opens up to a unification and standardization of OS management and deployment, allowing the integration with existing CI/CD workflows and/or GitOps, reducing complexity.
RHEL Image mode also helps increasing security as the content, updates and patches are predictable and atomic, preventing manual modification of core services, packages and applications for a guaranteed consistency at scale.
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I know all of this already and honestly I’m just amused at how long it has taken. Forget I said anything. Enjoy working on rhel for the rest of your life.
Image mode RHEL is a pretty significant investment.
Apart from that, in terms of keeping RHEL relevant, most of the attention is on making it easier to operate fleets at scale rather than the OS itself. Red Hat Insights, Image Builder, services in general, etc.
Those are the key things that would keep it competitive against Ubuntu, Debian, Alma, Oracle etc.
We don’t run anything on bare metal anymore it’s all containers (90k employee very large enterprise).
Of course I can’t speak for all the teams, but all new projects are going out on kubernetes and we don’t care about rhel at all, typically it’s alpine it Debian base images
When I say "we don't run anything on" I mean our involvement in the infra begins after those layers; sure, maybe someone at google cloud is doing rhel stuff but we don't care. Push button receive kubeconfig.
Talos Linux. Replaced a fleet of RHEL OpenShift with Talos recently. We're planning on moving the rest to Talos within 1.5 years. Basically, bare metal OS is going to be an implementation detail abstracted away from the internal users and developers.
