Rocky Linux – Gregory Kurtzer, CIQ

This is Textron TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

We're here with Gregory kurtzer. Who is the CIO for ciq? They just filled out their whole management team and they're building a distribution of rocking Linux.

And so the question immediately comes to mind with so many Linux distributions out there. Why do we need another one Gregory balls? All yours?

Thank you. Michael great question. So as you as you alluded to there are hundreds, if not thousands of Linux distributions that have existed over the years many of them really feeling kind of particular niches within the community.

Where we really focused on was to fill the gaping hole after Centos was end of life Centos was one of the prominent. If not, one of the most largely utilized Linux distributions in the Enterprise and cloud computing spaces and that project was end of life and it got moved to instead of being behind where I had an Enterprise Linux. It was moved to in front of red hat Enterprise Linux as a testing ground and as a solution for people who want to see kind of what might be coming in redhead Enterprise Linux and in the Enterprise Linux ecosystem as a whole so that left the gaping hole as I said in the Enterprise Linux Community for a freely available Enterprise Learning solution, which Centos historically taken once that was end of life.

We came along and we created Rocky Linux, which was designed to be a complete drop in replacement for everybody. Who is Using Centos Linux as of the time when it was end of life. So what drives people towards Rocky Linux versus going with something like Rel is it just a matter of support and Licensing fees or is a matter of the licensing terms?

What exactly is it the root of the conversation there? Great another great question. So red hat Enterprise Linux is a tremendous product.

It is is a lot of utilization and Enterprise Community is definitely using it or going to continue using it but that's not necessarily the best solution for everybody because it's not free. It is quite expensive actually. Because Red Hat Enterprise Linux is derived on so much existing open source software.

It makes sense for there to always be a freely available form of Enterprise Linux with the migration of Centos kind of going from behind redhead Enterprise Linux to now in front of it. It actually also further engages the community to create Enterprise Linux as a as a standard more as a community standard as opposed to a red hat standard. So what we've seen happen is this kind of a shuffle of everything.

Centos used to be behind it is now in front. It is a community portal. It is a community collaboration point for what is going into Enterprise Linux.

And that means that Rocky Linux is now a child of centostream as is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So right at Enterprise Linux and Rocky are now more appears as opposed to one being an upstream and one being a downstream. We're both of us kind of have the same parent of of Centos stream now, To your to your question.

org and we're gonna start seeing value add opt-ins into Rocky Linux now again, I want to be very clear Rocky Linux is still going to be a bug for bug level of compatibility with the Enterprise Linux Community. But now you can actually have some additional features on top of that. So we see that as that's that stable Foundation that everybody can go everybody can grab and you know exactly what you're going to get what you're going to expect from that stable foundation.

And now there's going to be additional add-ons that you can have that the rocky Community is producing. Okay, it's all happened over the course of the last year or so or maybe a year and a half. So what's been the adoption rate of Rocky Linux?

Like what's been the reception? The adoption rate has been massive at the low point we're seeing about and in a lot of this is a guess because we have over a hundred mirrors of Rocky Linux, but we're guessing at the low point. It's about a quarter million new downloads per month on the upper side of that.

We're seeing it approaching a million downloads per month. So we're seeing a massive amount of update. We're seeing various comparisons that are out there like the Apple status.

If you're not familiar with apple, it is the extra packages for Enterprise Linux repository hosted by Fedora and they do publish a I wouldn't call it raw data, but they do publish a lot of their download data about, you know, all of the different Enterprise Linux variants that are connecting to that and what we're seeing is is Rocky has an amazing trajectory right now where it is basically just running neck and neck with red hat Enterprise. Linux and with Centos stream and those are the top three on that list. But if you look at ephemeral systems ephemeral systems or systems that have short lives a lot of people will be using ephemeral systems for things like cicd for devops for various development container development Etc.

Rocky Linux is now just towering over it is just on a massive acceleration curve beating by far everybody else in within the Apple community. So we're very happy with with Rocky Linux is adoption and what Rocky Linux brings into that Enterprise Linux community and and frankly what it brings to all of the Enterprise organizations and individuals that do need that stable Linux Foundation. Do you think in general we kind of stopped paying enough attention to operating systems?

We kind of started looking at other things whether it's containers or all these other Platforms in yet the operating system continues to evolve. So you know, what are you looking forward to as we go along here with operating systems? What's kind of you know top of Mind from where you sit.

You touch on another really tremendous point and we've talked in the past about containers and the container ecosystem a little bit. You're definitely right the role of operating systems have changed and it's kind of Taken on now to kind of predominant roles one is helping run the base operating system right or providing a platform for applications to run directly on top of Hardware whether virtual Hardware or physical Hardware, but it is that interface to your Hardware, but the other role of operating systems now is the user space component of the operating system that container in a matter of speaking right that container which is the libraries the binaries the the infrastructure that container out there contained application may require in order to to provide the the necessity of the requirements and dependencies for that application. So that Application requires something like open SSL or requires, you know a C library or something along those lines that core operating system does provide that and so there's been there's been now kind of this separation of what it is at the Linux distribution provides.

Not only is it the kind of Legacy historical background of yeah. It's what you installed directly to your Hardware whether again physical or virtual but now it's also what are you using is your base within your container and we are definitely promoting the use and and supporting both of the use or the use of both of those models. As we go along we're all so here in more about there's going to be support for rust programming languages in Linux in the future and more of a shift towards these memories safe environments.

Is that going to drive and upgrade of operating systems do you think because people are looking at changing a lot of the fundamentals and how applications are built and you kind of need the change to stack to go with it. I think it's going to be very interesting to see what unfolds over the next half a decade to decade with regards to the kernel and and how people are going to be leveraging some of the some of the new features in the kernel in terms of lower barrier of Entry of programming languages and interfaces to the kernel. So I'm very excited to see where that lands in terms of predictions.

Um, I think we're gonna see more people being able to contribute and and be part of the Linux Community, which I think is fantastic. We also hear a lot about ebpf which is in that micro kernel thing that you were talking about and it seems like to me if I'm not misreading. This is a lot of the networking tools and a lot of the storage tools and even the security stuff is now gonna kind of sit in their own little lights and leaning micro kernel and so we're gonna see this massive upgrade cycle and all those tools as we kind of shift to the next generation of operating systems.

Um, I think so, but I also I I like to see more and more coming down into user space as well or to provide user space hooks into the kernel. I I think we're going to see especially with the Advent of container Computing and orchestration of container Computing. I think we're going to see a lot more in that vein.

All right. So now you get your old gang of people working for you know, you've got the whole Squad built out where you gonna be a year from now, what's the prediction? So the first thing that I want to mention is Rocky Linux is its own Community.

It's it's own organization and we've put that specifically outside of ciq and ciq is my company. I see I'm CEO and founder of but we put this we put Rocky and we put all of our open source capabilities that we contribute to and or created and maintain outside of the corporate umbrella of ciq, and we did this because we Seen a lot of companies at this point that have pivoted open source projects based on. Internal corporate agendas and internal requirements for revenue and you know open source is not a switch that you turn on and off, you know based on marketing or sales requirements.

It is a it is a open and collaborative development model which yields amazing results when done properly with with projects that people really need and require. So we've taken special effort to ensure that ciq is not in a position where we are owning or controlling or holding hostage open source projects. So we are purposely putting them outside of ciq and and encouraging other organizations to contribute and take part in these open source projects.

So first thing I want to mention is Rocky Linux as one of the open source projects that we contribute to and we we help in sponsor is outside of ciq ciq now is for To create a business model which is ethical and adds value to customers because we don't control it and we don't hold it hostage. So that puts the onus on us to actually create value and that's where we've been focusing. So ciq is the primary services and support partner for Rocky Linux and we are the founding sponsor of Rocky Linux.

But again other organizations can come along and offer support and offer services behind Rocky Linux, and we encourage that Google has announced, you know within the last six months ish that they have done that and they're doing that very actively with with Google Cloud. So the first thing I wanted to mention really is that Rocky is a standalone organization that's focused on the community and collaboration within the community now see IQ is adding value on top of that commercial value Enterprise Value so we do offer Port we do offer various Services Professional Services education and value add on top of Rocky Linux. These value adds are in terms of customizations.

They're in terms of support additional enhancements that you may need as well as Professional Services as I mentioned. So ciq now has now raised funding and we've now built a very strong team to do this and this team that we pulled along and was able to recruit because there's a number of people out there within the world both organizations as well as individuals that love this Vision. This Vision that open source is so great that you know, if you love something you should set it free and so that's kind of been our Mantra with regards to open source, and then a company has to come along and basically provide an ethical business model of value and that's really what we've been doing.

So we've been able to recruit an amazing tremendous group of people to really Help with that vision and and that's been our that's that's our current big announcement that we're coming out with so we're really happy to talk about that. And just to be clear does the rocking Linux have its own like governing board or Consortium or is it going to be part of another Consortium or how do you kind of perceive the the governing body around that? Oh another great question.

So when we first kicked off, there's a little bit of a story here. I'll keep it brief, but there's a little bit of a story here. So when we first kicked off Rocky Linux, it was of an urgent requirement that we basically had to go and solve a pain point for the community of everybody now needs this Enterprise freely available Enterprise Linux distribution.

So we immediately started building that but we also immediately saw opportunity for how are we going to do? This better? Right Centos has been fantastic, right?

It's been incredibly advantageous for I mean everybody in the Enterprise Community practically, so there's a lot of things that it's done tremendously well, but that doesn't mean that some things can't be improved upon. So we looked at what things happened early on in the scent in centos's Foundation and development that could we have done a little bit differently, which would have created a different culture a different Community around Centos. And so that's really, you know, we paid special effort into that.

But because we were all rushing to kind of get this deliverable out there into the community of you know, to solve this pain point. We also put some of the formalization of that on the back burner just in terms of as we're managing priorities once we got rocky ate out there and then Rocky 9 was right around the corner. So then we focused on our build system got rocky 9 out there now Rocky 8 as well as Rocky 9 or out there and being highly utilized.

We really wanted to make sure that now okay. We we have this vision for what Rocky Enterprise software Foundation should be let's now go back and formalize it and we're right now in the last stages, you're gonna see our next press release later this month is going to be specifically on how are we actually Formalizing the rocky Enterprise Linux structure board of directors management leadership. How are we creating an inclusive community such that anybody anybody in the world who wants to be part of what it is that we're doing with Rocky can actually not only be part of this not only be a contributor but eventually even have a pathway to become a leader of this organization.

And so that's been very important to us and we've been working very hard to build that and as I said, we're in the final stages right now and we are expecting another press release a little bit later this month specifically on that and I'd love to be able to talk with you again about that as soon as soon as that's available. All right, when we look forward to that, hey Gregory. Thanks for being on the show and giving us an update on what's going on with Rocky Linux and we'll be talking again soon.

I suspect shortly. Absolutely. Thank you Michael.

All right back to you guys in the studio.