There is nothing to drag. A single server distro is becoming irrelevant as the unit of computation resources is the kubernetes cluster. I.e. all the app see is a set of kubernetes nodes, it does not really care what server disto you are running on.
In the HN/cloud echo chamber, that might be worth pointing out.
They're the tools used by the people backing your Kube cluster :P
IPA/IdM is the gold standard for user management on a fleet of servers.
Gluster is the best replicated filesystem hands down and Ceph is the only alternative to expensive SANs that scales well.
Ansible is by far the most popular config management tool.
Foreman+Candlepin/Satellite is one of the few sane ways to do patch management.
There are a lot more things RH has under their belt that I could talk about but I just did the list that was mentioned.
Note that once you use containers, you decouple your infra tools from the app dev tool.
You can kick the can really far down the road but whether is your ops team, your VPS provider, or a massive cloud someone has to pick it up and they will likely do so using tools developed by Red Hat.
And that's why people DO pay for red-hat. Peace of mind, whether supported by evidence or not.
However, one the state of the art architecture is micro services, the optimal runtime is kuberentes. Once everyone is on kubernetes hardware will not matter.
Moreover, I would love a cloud based on second hand hardware (which should be much cheaper than 30%).
I’ve wanted to do this for some time, but there’s a lot of cost involved in the space (square footage itself, electricity, cooling) that you can’t cut just by running older stuff. Bandwidth and storage cost the same regardless as well (don’t buy used disks for anything remotely important).
Before the Westmere/Nehalam chips it was a different story, but anything newer is going to sip power and perform well as long as you know you’re not getting “all the perf out of it”.
It’s entirely possible to make a business out of this, but you rely on a customer base that’s inherently cheap and fussy by nature. Not all of them are, but most looking “for a deal” are cheapskates who will milk you dry in time/labor if you let them and you don’t have the margins to deal with that bullshit.
You CAN use Alpine as the hypervisor, but IBM/RedHat/Oracle customers typically don't.
Maybe there’s a market for intra container licenses but it’s a harder sell as even there the goal is to go slim.
And beyond kubernetes you have function as a service.
They managed to piss everyone off about 6 months after inserting IBM managers.
Typical "You're a startup. We're IBM. Our way has stood the test of time, so we'll help you out by implementing it here" stuff.
And I don't argue IBM has learned a lot of incredible business and management lessons over the years.
But you can't give a perfect playbook to someone of average intelligence, tell them they're the smartest person in the room because of the playbook, then turn them loose with other smart people and expect good things to happen.
It's questionable whether this can save them this late in the game, but there's solid seasoning behind it. IBM had few other ways to remain relevant as even crufty enterprise customers will eventually start move forward with containerization of workloads.