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IBM “Creative Destruction” is Working, Learn Red Hat

I read a really fascinating article about all the radical changes to my former employer (IBM) since 2019 beginning with the acquisition of Red Hat. The article title says it all: “Red Hat is The New IBM” They’re not wrong.

Let me just say it. I fucking hate Red Hat. But, my preferences for a Linux distro have nothing to do with the reality that Red Hat Linux is THE enterprise Linux distro, period. OpenShift is absolute shit as is podman. Doesn’t matter. It’s at least 50% of the Kubernetes market. My SME at TEK is constantly talking about Red Hat. My recruiter is constantly asking if I know anyone for “this OpenShift position that pays more than $160K.” Just search for yourself on Indeed. You’ll see. RedHat is the king of on-prem enterprise Linux, hands down.

Why do you care?

Because those who fail to be able to use and manage Red Hat Linux effectively will have no place in enterprise infrastructure engineering jobs. That’s the reason I ran Fedora as my desktop OS while at IBM for over 12 years. I created several RPMs from scratch and was intimately familiar with Red Hat’s particular quirks and strengths. I fucking hated it. I was a huge Debian fan. But, not having that knowledge today is literally a career killer if you want to work for 90% of the Fortune 500 or any of the companies that support them. I don’t make these rules. I just report them.

Thankfully, today I’m working in a job that requires I know vanilla Kubernetes. I’m not doing any work with package updates and Linux administration (other than my own systems at home). And I plan on staying in this space for a while, writing operations and security software for any Linux focused on cloud native engineering, but I’m going to use Red Hat (probably Rocky) for all my VMs to build my own clusters on. By the way, this is yet another reason not to use Minikube or Kind for anything but trivial Kubernetes work and testing. It also lights a fire under my ass to get fluff finished (now that Bonzai is, more or less, complete).

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