Operating System Management

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Operating System Management | Compiler

About the episode

The operating system is the foundation of IT infrastructure. It affects everything built on top of it. Take good care of it, and you're on your way to a smooth platform for your application. Neglect to maintain it? Well, you might run into some problems.

Scott McBrien, Technical Product Marketing Manager at Red Hat, recalls his experiences managing the operating system over the years. He covers the consequences of forgetting to keep the OS up to date, why standardization across your hardware is key, why upgrades go wrong—and how to deal with all of the above.

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In the grand scheme of things, does the distribution matter at all? Oh, you are jumping right into some of the longest battles. Oh, yeah. Right? Oh my God, I am going to get mail after, I'm going to get pings after, somebody on the Discord is going to come for me. This is Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat. I'm your host, Emily Bock, a Senior Product Manager at Red Hat. And I'm Jennifer Scalf, Senior Manager of a team of Technical Account Managers at Red Hat. On this show, we go beyond the buzzwords and jargon and simplify tech topics. This season, we're covering the fundamentals of IT infrastructure. And in this episode, we dive right into operating system management. IT infrastructure is what makes our digital lives possible. Operating systems, networks, virtual machines, containers, and automation are a few of the components that let developers build applications and deliver them to your devices. In this season of Compiler, we're giving these pillars of the digital world the love and attention they deserve. We'll talk a bit about what they are and share some advice on how to handle them and set everyone up for success. And to help us out, we're joined by the terrific Jennifer Scalf, friend of the pod, and a genuine expert in the foundations that keep the tech industry humming. Thank you. I can't wait to go into a bit more detail. I have about 27 years now of experience keeping all kinds of systems running at old past jobs. I was a system administrator where we literally took the machines out of the boxes, put them in the rack, put the wires in, put the cables in, set up the switches and the routers. We installed the operating systems, the databases, all the way up through applications that folks were using every day for all kinds of intense, powerful services such as cancer research. After I left being a system administrator for about nine years at Red Hat, I was then helping folks do that for six years as a technical account manager on the platform side across financial services, retail, telco. And now I've moved into being a manager of a large team of technical account managers doing exactly that, keeping the infrastructure up and running and updated and letting them know about the latest technology that would affect them, make their lives easier, make their businesses run smoother, hit their business objectives. I'm so excited to be involved in this podcast series. I'm so excited that I can help show people that it's not just about putting the pieces together and having your infrastructure. It's also about taking pride in what their users are then doing with that infrastructure. That is awesome. Yeah, that infrastructure is the foundation that you build everything else on. It sounds like you're the infrastructure equivalent of a full stack plus kind of expert. Exactly. And I did want to say really quick, we all the time talk about what folks are doing with services, with products, with infrastructure, with architecture. But my focus has always been, for some reason, I'm this person that's obsessed with how you build it in the first place, and my team is obsessed with how you build it in the first place. That's really cool. I feel like it's like building a race car and everybody talks about how fast it goes, but you can really geek out about how you made it do that. Yeah. Back in the day, about 20 some years ago, we used to say it was like building a plane and you would just stick all the pieces on, and RHEL, for those that don't know, that's Red Hat Enterprise Linux was we've already built the plane. You could just take that plane and just take off with it, right? Well, that makes perfect sense. And actually, that's a perfect segue because we're going to kick off our season on infrastructure by diving into operating system management specifically. We spoke with Scott McBrien, a Technical Product Marketing Manager here at Red Hat. You may remember him from such films as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Field Guides, and he's big on getting the details right. I think operating system is one of those things that people think they know what it is but don't necessarily entirely know what it is. For Linux distributions, the operating system is Linux, but as a distribution manufacturer, we then pick literally thousands of additional pieces of software to complete the distribution. So it's not just Linux, which operates the hardware and does process scheduling and handles CPU load and memory allocation, but it's also the web browser, the graphical desktop environment, the Wayland X compositor, PHP of various flavors, Python. We choose all of the different components that come together into a Linux distribution. Yeah. Back to our race car situation, it might be the engine, but there's a whole lot more to the car there as well. We're going to break that down a little bit and cover a couple of things here. In an enterprise setting, you're much more likely to run into Linux than Windows or macOS or anything else these days, why is that? I think traditionally, if you go back to when I started again years and years and years ago, it was so customizable, it didn't matter which distribution that you were picking at the time necessarily because folks were doing that, putting on whatever wheels they want, putting on the engine, putting in... Okay, I'm getting to the end of my car analogies, but that's okay, right? I know why I started that way, I know very little about them. Right, but that's okay. And I always, again, I go back to the plane because we were also making jokes about helicopters back in the day. Each individual Linux distribution originally was generated by whomever was just passionate about, and they were built for different things, some of the different distributions. They were just a passionate group of people that had all kinds of different hardware. Oh my gosh, because Linux can run on anything. You had to have the right drivers, you had to pay a certain fee, you had to do... And there was all kinds of things back in the day that everybody was worried about. And so instead, you would just go online and you would just download, and if you go real far back, you would just get your floppy disks. Oh my goodness. But it usually had, at least for the commercial hardware that you go out to whatever big box store and buy hardware, usually you could find a Linux distribution that would run on that hardware. And then once we graduated from college, we took it with us. We were building these things and then, well, I don't want to go and use somebody else's operating system. I want to use the operating system that I was able to easily run on whatever hardware maybe our parents had discarded. The crossover was insane, and then we wanted to take that into our work life because it just made it easy, we already knew what we were doing. I think you nailed it with the, especially with the customizability because that's not just for personal preference, but it also gives you that flexibility to run it on basically anything. I think I found that if it has a screen, usually it can run some form of Linux. Exactly. Which makes it perfect for things like edge devices, et cetera. I have to interrupt you real quick, Emily, because a lot of times there was no screen, and so that was it. We were all command line, and I think a lot of times we still are, right? Don't tell my friends who developed the UI. But my point is, even if you didn't have a screen, it was so easy and it was so cheap to get your web server set up, get your mail service. And back in the day, again, it's a little bit more complicated now, but I really do think that's how it got its grounding and its footing and it works. Well, 100%. And as a UI product manager, I am grievously wounded. I'm so sorry. But I will forgive you. But I think cheap also is a big part of it as well because you have the control that comes with customizability. You don't have a Microsoft or an Apple just deciding to change the OS and break your entire enterprise infrastructure. You have some control over what goes into it, and they tend to be at least if not cheaper, you have the option to fork and manage something yourself if it's really important to you. If there's one thing Linux enthusiasts like to argue over, it's which distribution they're using. In the grand scheme of things, does the distribution matter at all? Oh, you are jumping right into some of the longest battles. Oh, yeah. It's not a podcast if you don't throw a couple grenades in there. Right. Oh my God. I am going to get mail after, I'm going to get pings after. Oh, somebody on the Discord is going to come for me. It does matter. It does matter because, and I wasn't trying to go too deep into it and I still won't, but each one of my large network of friends who have been directly involved in creating and maintaining many different type distributions 25 years ago and today do it for particular reasons. They all either naturally have a different interest. They come from different backgrounds. Some of them were very security minded from day one, so their Linux distribution was built to be secure. That doesn't mean it is very usable to the general public. Oh, yeah. If you use that particular distribution, you are going to avoid some of the complications of using different hardware because there are now, and I'm thinking back to my friend Vincent, your series you just had, there are now all kinds of security vulnerabilities because of certain hardware, firmware, those layers. Some of the folks that built some of these distributions focus 100% on that. Some of these distributions focus much more on usability, how many different types of systems it can run on so there's always a give and take. Some want to be tiny. Edge cases. Oh my gosh, that's the hottest thing right now, right? Edge everything. Oh, yeah. So hot right now. Now, that comes with its own because you have a one core, you have a four core, you have... So many cores, so little cores on the edge. If it's in your toaster, it's only going to have half a core. No, I'm just kidding. So every distribution has their own focus and why they've been built the way they've been built, what they decided to include. Now there are only a few big, big, big distributions still, and there's only always been a few big, big, big ones. But to be clear, the sky's the limit in terms of Linux distributions.

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Compiler

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