For now. Like I said, the amount of work being done on the host level is going to decrease as organizations move away from traditional monoliths and into purpose built microservices.

Yes, some companies will still run their environments like it’s 2014 in 2025, but that percentage is going to decrease considerably when the productivity, cost, and maintainability gains of orchestration tools like kubernetes are realized.

I went from being a traditional bare metal sysadmin surrounded by a team of 30+ to a cloud admin that could do the work of 25 datacenter techs to a DevOps Engineer who can do what would have taken dozens of sysadmins to do 10 years ago.

Businesses can tolerate their tech debt for awhile, but eventually economics takes over and those businesses either adapt or fail.

I just don’t see something like RHEL existing in its current form without being the de facto enterprise standard, and moves like this make companies more likely to look for alternatives.

I know the vendors I work closely with are all moving away from that model.

Prediction: RHEL dies in the next 5-10 years anyway while everyone moves to free options. Considering the amount of containerization being run on production systems, whatever VM is running docker or k8s doesn’t need to really be managed to the same level that VM/bare metal webservers required in the past.

Sure, some big orgs will still foot the license fees, but considering CentOS/RHEL was the standard previously, I don’t really see a benefit for corps to pay those fees any longer. Most will probably move to some random free stable distro for their VMs, and run any production resources via lightweight containers based on something like Alpine.