Transitioning to Rocky Linux

so so yeah if you haven't seen me on the webinar before uh I I've I've been in academic high performance Computing for a while I've been kind of in and out of the National Lab space and the uh the higher ed space universities things like that just doing HPC clusters uh and that brings me to ciq by way of werewolf mostly but also a lot of interest in Rocky Linux and Apper all of which I had used before joining ciq so really glad to be part of the team here and uh actually I'm there's been a little bit of a a change in my role

here at ciq I've been doing the solutions architect thing for a while here uh but I'm I'm digging in a little bit more with fuzzball these days and so emphasizing a bit more of my my HBC background and and really excited to be a part of that team and and be working with them to to bring fuzzball to Market all right well next time I we do this and I update the slide I'll just put Jonathan Anderson fuzzball got it oh yeah uh I'm John Brown I'm a senior analyst with the Enterprise strategy group uh I cover off on infrastructure and operations management um and

uh you know excited to to be here uh and talking about these things I work for an organization called Enterprise strategy group abbreviated as ESG that worked perfectly until sustainability became a thing and now we have to say it out uh Enterprise strategy group but we are a boutique a large Boutique analyst uh firm covering off on largely B2B technology how that's get getting implemented we do a good job of predicting the future um and helping uh organizations like Rocky you know make sure that their uh nciq uh making sure that they go to markets and and their Market information is is up to Snuff

um so you know my little pitch uh for Enterprise strategy group as is required by law um but I did want to you know sort of do a level set on a couple of points before we get into the discussion uh and actually real quick I we I I said this earlier and I totally forgot uh there will be a part in this discussion later where we want to answer some questions from the audience so if you've got some questions uh go ahead and put them in the chat uh we'll be watching that and when we get to the part where we're addressing some kind

of open-ended questions and we're in that part of the discussion we'll we'd love to take those questions so yeah thanks sorry if interrupting yeah no sure just some basic facts just some things to level set the uh the conversation here uh you know a couple of quick points you know as analysts we have to sort of wrap things up and tell you what we're thing seeing but first inir US sentos 7 support ends in June 2024 which is coming up quickly uh second point is that Rocky Linux is free it's it's an open source Enterprise operating system that's compatible with red hat Enterprise Linux uh

and we're going to spend the majority of our time today talking about Rocky Linux um third observation is that CI IQ is the founding support and services partner of the rocky Linux project um and so you know we're speaking with the the folks that uh that are behind all of this um and I also wanted to um you know talk a little bit about what's changing in the world of it because some of that is important if you're making a decision about an Enterprise operating system um you know Trend one and two is modernizing infrastructure uh you know going more toward Cloud native to support

containers and micro Services uh but when it comes to OS infrastructures organizations are modernizing their Centos related environments to Rocky Linux to preserve their Investments and to ensure long-term security and Li and uh stability security and stability Trend three maybe you've heard of this um AI kind of a thing um what we are finding in our studies is that AI infrastructure relies on HPC high performance Computing and this is an era where Rocky Linux has experienced a great deal of uptake so against that backdrop and those facts let us have a discussion and drive a little bit more deeply into Rocky Linux and uh ciq

so Jonathan first question out to you you know there's a ton of Linux distributions that enterprises can choose from what separates Rocky Linux from the other available uh Linux dros uh that are there so a lot that comes down to a lot that goes into sorry the discussion or the decision of of picking a Linux distribution uh for whatever use case is the culture and the and I don't even necessarily mean like the people culture but kind of the business organization culture around what the priorities are of different distributions uh people have tended to use the Enterprise Linux family of distributions um for this long-term

stability both at the hardware side of knowing if I have this OS and it runs on this Hardware it will continue to run on this hardware for a 10year time period or more um but also if I have applications that run on it they will continue to do so uh often without um modification uh or with without having to to make any changes to keep it running for that long time period and then keep that platform supported over that time period uh so if you've come up in any of the Enterprise Linux environments uh re uh Rock Red Hat Enterprise Linux or or sentos or

some of the new ones well another one from the past has been scientific Linux which has been uh a part of this conversation as well but new ones being Rocky if you're using Rocky today or if you're using Almo or any of these things that are part of this uh Enterprise Linux family of distributions uh you'll be right at home with Rocky it's uh you know one forone compatible rebuild of the the red hat platform uh the the Enterprise Linux platform and you know is expected to be so for the the foreseeable future and then you know with ciq you have benefits of support within

that platform one of the things I like to highlight uh is that um you don't have this separation of your supported and unsupported environment you don't have ciq operating system and Rocky Linux for the different parts of your infrastructure you can just run one thing everywhere and then apply support as needed um yeah I mean okay good I how's that been accepted by the Linux Community I mean are you getting the the downloads are you are you seeing that acceptance yeah great so I I've got a slide here to show if we can get that up for for this and and the these are statistics

you know we've talked about these before these are inherently limited statistics but this is the best uh data that we have and something that we track internally just both on the community side and the ciq side is something that interesting so this is unique uh systems accessing different or from different Enterprise linuxes the the extra packages for Enterprise Linux projects so there's a community project for providing you know unsupported packages for the Enterprise Linux family of distributions and this is a statistic that they gather uh how old is a system that is uh has accessed it and from what distribution and so we see you

know Rocky Linux with the heavy green line here going up into the right which of course we like to see um and we're actually a lot in an analyst school but upward and to the right is generally a positive sign and this data looks very real it's as messy as real yes so I there there's an uptick in everything right now if you see right at the very rightmost part of the graph we expect that this is about kind of uh testing the waters on different distributions part of a Centos 7 migration strategy one of the things you mentioned earlier is Centos 7 which has

a huge uh distribution um what do I want to say yeah footprint there we go thank you a huge distribution footprint uh is going end of life very soon now uh and so we we see an uptick everywhere across the board as people are you know doing test deployments with different distributions um and this includes this yellow sentos Legacy which we would expect is most Centos 7 could in theory be Centos 8 but very so there was some that that Centos 7 Spike uh and then we can see that that comes off and you guys actually change slope of your line to start accelerating uh

pretty hard in the last couple of periods here so looks like this is a graph of crunch time yep so we're we're excited by this of course and and this is the best data we have the limitations of it are clearly not everyone uses apple and in fact the more enterpr Ry you are the less likely to uh use it you are but still it's it's pretty well uh used even in Enterprise workloads and then the other thing is the bigger you are the more likely you are to use a local mirror of apple and not be hitting the Upstream um so you know that

the data gets fuzzy on the extremes of the type of deployment you are but yeah but directionally yeah Direction seems to be going in a good direction yeah you you see acceleration like this and you can reasonably assume that that's what you're going to see elsewhere um and you guys actually probably not you know you can look at what's happening in the support cues and what's going on in the forums uh you know to be able to gauge and get a real good idea of oh who's new who's testing versus yes and there there we can see how that there's a lot of traffic in

the community at Rocky Linux but then we lose the comparison we're of course not as embedded in the support infrastructure of another commercial Enterprise Linux or even in the community side of of other Enterprise Linux Community distributions yeah yeah I mean great data great data here I mean certainly indicative of of uptake now you had previously talked a little bit about support you know and how there's no division between ciq and Rocky Linux itself itself can you talk to me about why enterprise Enterprise class support which you folks offer is is a value and worthy investment sure so I I do want to make one

or uh one clarification there so that there is a distinction between ciq and Rocky Linux for sure between the community side and the Enterprise support that we provide and and this is a a a confusion that comes up a lot so I just don't want to mislead people uh the the community distribution is an independent entity run by the the rocky enterprise software Foundation or RF but uh the the benefit that I'm talking about is we support the community distribution so there there isn't like special Enterprise version of Rocky Linux that you have to deploy or maintain separately uh benefits of Enterprise or sorry of

Enterprise support that you get uh from ciq are you know trouble ticketing uh if you have a problem with the operating system from a use perspective or from a bug perspective you know we can help uh either address problems that you're having uh we build custom images for our clients uh for use on clouds or in local like kubernetes environments that kind of thing uh we've gone as far as building a whole os3 variant of Rocky Linux for deployment in stateless or not stateless in immutable uh environments um which has been a whole a whole project that's been pretty inter immutable environment so Frozen in

Time like we set it up and yeah yeah so that the whole OS tree thing is about not deploying new uh new updates into the running system but deploying kind of a new system alongside it and then you switch back and forth depending uh so yeah none of that existed uh for Rocky Lin but we worked on that image and I I think that either is or is on its way into the community side of things too even though it was developed in house but that's something that we did with one of our clients um but then if you find a bug in a package

uh whether it's a security problem or uh a a um you know a functionality problem uh we can work with you to understand your use case and get it resolved and then get it resolved locally and then try and get that fixed upstreamed either into the Centos Community or the Fedora Community or one of the real Upstream projects and we're doing a bit of that even at the kernel level uh we have a client that's having some performance issues with um with nvme storage and not not the not IO performance but kind of management of those devices and working uh to get fixes for that

in the the Upstream kernel if they hadn't been part of support and and had that support they would not have been able to work with you uh in that way yeah and they they of course can the value of Open Source they can do that themselves they can work on that and then try and get it upstreamed but that's a service that we provide is digging in with you and understanding a problem you're having and then working with getting that fix into the communities that we then all benefit yeah and I would imag in having access to to your engineers um you know who are

there working at that kental level really makes a huge difference uh in the in the level of support you get AB absolutely and then beyond just the the kind of Frontline support you know break fix trouble shooting that kind of thing help helping you use one of these projects or products uh we also have value ads that we support as part of the Enterprise Linux platform on top of Rocky Linux so one that I'm really excited about are we pack package uh Upstream stable and long-term maintenance kernels for use with Rocky Linux so one of the reasons people use an Enterprise Linux distribution is this

very long-term Frozen in time and then security supported kernel yeah but there there are downsides that you don't get performance improvements or new features that are coming out in the new kernel you know every month or every two months yeah it's really a question of of whether you have to have an IT audit team you need to satisfy yeah but if if you're more interested in using the the stable user space of Enterprise Linux that you get with Rocky but you'd like the new hardware support or or new performance or or new functionality that you would get from an upstream kernel uh we're offering that

as an add-on that's not part of Rocky Linux uh but is something that you can use in conjunction with Rocky Linux as part of a ciq supported platform neat okay all right that gives me a good feel um for the level of support and what you guys offer in the space we did um unless you had something else we do have a couple of questions uh that have come in uh from from the audience and I will also lean on the webcast producer in case there are some other questions that need to be surfaced that I can't see um but the first question that uh

comes up is about HPC and Ai and how can Rocky Linux help in the context of HPC and for us building out our AI yeah so um in HPC at least any HPC environment I've been a part of Enterprise Linux is really well established I Centos has been a player in HPC for as long as my career and and maybe longer uh and Rocky Linux just is a a drop in replacement if if you've been using Centos for sure and certainly uh if you're at often what happens is you're at a a site that has a large Enterprise Linux uh footprint as you said uh

but then you have a Centos deployment in your academic or research portion uh of your your Institute um we we would like to think that you could you know continue using Rocky Linux in the same Community focused way that you have for however long you've been in HPC uh just by replacing Centos with it but then because there is commercial support available for Rocky we can have that conversation with a larger it organization about you know maybe instead of having these two different distributions that you're having to maintain and manage separately um there's a benefit to bringing that all into one uh one deployment strategy

um for AI we expect most of that growth to come in the in cloud deployments and so we have some Partnerships with uh you know the big players in Cloud that and we're I think we can talk about now uh that we're um you know we we're just starting a new partnership with Google to be part of both the backend infrastructure and uh the user accessible uh kind of running the user application uh in Rocky Linux and so we've been doing some work with Google to both customize Rocky Linux for uh you know performance and reliability on the Google infrastructure but also to make sure

that it's the best scenario possible uh when using it to manage your your applications on that Google infrastructure um and you get the same benefits there that you would get anywhere else long-term stability long-term support um and a familiar environment uh that you're probably already using yep okay fantastic um I I have another question here I don't know if you want to take this one or not but I'll read it to you it says hey let's go for it we use red hat Enterprise Linux are there situations where Rocky is a better fit than red hat so from from a technical stand Point like the

whole point is that they're the same right so uh it it should be for the most part drop in and just use it like you're using it uh the the reason you might want to prefer uh Rocky in the same way that you might have preferred Centos before over you know a a commercial distribution uh like Red Hats uh Enterprise Linux um is is the licensing model is the biggest thing to me uh so for the most part uh in a production environment um you're you're typically paying per core or per node or per virtual machine or something like that uh for access to an

Enterprise Linux uh commercial distribution clearly in the community that's not the case and it hasn't been the case with Centos forever it's Community operating system you can download it and install it uh but one of the things that I really appreciate about ciq support offering the way we say it is that we support the people not the computers I I sometimes say we support people not process and so our support is scaled by the size of your team at a technical level it's the the number of people that can open trouble tickets with us and so it's not the number of users it's not how

many people are in your organization but however many people that we're supporting uh that that's what you pay for with Rocky Linux support that is I like that and this comes back to that bifurcation of your support infrastructure you don't have like a thing that would happen yeah secret don't tell anyone a thing that would happen is you'd have like a few commercially supported servers and then a large distrib or Community stuff and then you have a problem over there and now you have to go replicate it in your supported environment before you can open a case you don't have to worry about that with

us uh if you are running Rocky Linux and you are a supported person uh we'll support you wherever you're running whether it's in the cloud it's in a virtual infrastructure it's on uh on a cluster wherever you are uh we is uh that's that's super refreshing actually um that's an interesting way to scale and it actually is indicative of the the support you're getting um and so I like that as opposed to proc as opposed to processor-based licensing um you know as a former product manager licensing was always you know you're always trying to scale it and extract the most value and I like that

yours is really predicated on how much value you're delivering uh you know as opposed to you know trying to maximize that number uh you know as as much as possible so that is refreshing um the last question that's here this one is looks like a trivia question largely but it's hey what's the largest implementation of Rocky Linux that you're aware of like who's the giant Enterprise you know H yeah so I I'm I'm not in a position to name individual clients but I I can say that we have at least a couple uh Partners in in kind of the Academia Academia or National Lab space

especially where they're running Rocky Linux on some you know hundreds to thousands of compute nodes and in in that kind of classic deployment sense that's what where my mind goes are are those couple of people that I know that are doing it in some pretty large okay that are running PC clust but but the the real truth is probably uh in the clouds and in the hyperscalers and there we just don't have the data uh I think as our partnership with those uh with those providers solidifies we we'll be getting some more of that data but I certainly don't have it and my my recent

recollection is that we've actually been trying to get some of that information out of our uh out of our partners just how many people are running Rocky Linux in Google and Amazon that would be yeah that would be a good statistic a good statistic to have we're working on it changing as well all right well um you know that that was the time we had for for Q&A uh here so we're at the end of our scheduled um Talk we're coming right up on you know uh 29 uh 29 minutes or so uh last question where can people go where should they go to get

more information about Rocky Linux great so on the community side Rocky linux.org is a great place to start uh there's forums there's documentation for how the operating system is laid out how the project is laid out if you're interested in getting involved and from there the best place to go is the rocky Linux mattermost it's a a chat platform very similar to slack if if you're familiar with that um that's where most of the community discourse happens uh both from an organization and and making the work and the distribution happen in the first place but also for people that use the distribution and need help

or have questions or or any any of that um from from a ciq perspective C iq.com if you're interested in uh in talking with us about support or some of the value ads that we offer uh on top of the rocky Linux and Enterprise Linux platform um there's an easy like contact us button right there on the front page or you can explore around look at some of the products which you know exceeds just Rocky Linux we as I mentioned before support werewolf and Apper and Ascender which is an anible orchestration platform and a few other things um so by all means check us out at cq.

look around in there uh contact us through that if you'd like more information or get in touch with the community at Rocky linux.org outstanding well Jonathan it's been a pleasure talking to you the the twin Jonathan show um you know hopefully this was informative for the folks that uh that stayed with us uh over the over the webcast I had fun um I would do it again thanks for having me yeah thank you for being in here and and thank you for you know some of the the market investigation and kind of helping to set the groundwork for understanding what's going on in the the

Enterprise and Linux space in general help us out with that well cool well I feel done so our producer can can go ahead and end yeah thank thanks everyone for joining the webinar uh we hope that you'll you'll join us again next week same time as always and uh I I guess I don't know the topic for next week but I'm sure it'll be something to be good yeah yeah all right thanks [Music] [Music] everyone