Oracle Linux is essentially re-badged Red Hat Linux. It's fine, if you don't mind being in bed with Oracle. For me the choice between Red Hat, Oracle, or CentOS would come down to what is supported by the applications I am going to run, licensing, and licensing interactions.

But is it really? Oracle packages it's own "unbreakable" kernel and some additions quite deviate from RHEL. Have you been running Oracle Linux yourself? If so I am really interested in your experiences.

The kernel is it’s own optional package that’s basically 4.14.

The additional stuff is like, newer php, golang, etc. They also mirror EPEL and build it themselves.

There are other repos you can get these yourself on CentOS.

The one advantage of OL is that they historically got security updates out before CentOS. Not sure how that looks these days.

I have not heard a whole lot about Oracle Linux, I have heard a little bit good, but nothing bad.

Here is a specific claim that they make for it:

"Oracle Linux is the only Linux distribution that supports live, non-disruptive patching, both in the kernel space and in the user space."

My take on Oracle is that they are good at systems programming, the Oracle database is excellent in its own way, they have kept the Java legacy from Sun alive (at least on a technical basis, they may have screwed up the politics.)

I would not trust Oracle to do applications programming and I think they've bought a random stable of second-rate bizapps, but if there is no UI involved I think they do good.

If your company would rather deal with Oracle for support than with IBM/Red Hat or somebody else then that is also a positive. Also I would take the claim seriously that their Linux is well tuned for their database, they have been barking up that tree since 2000 or so.

My issue is I have not encountered anyone with first hand knowledge about using the OS and its support.

Regarding use cases we will mainly run K8s.

One of my mentors in the industry was an Oracle DBA.

She might have been below average at scripting but was a genius at getting what we paid for out of support. She got great results out of Oracle and Sun, the central IT organization and all of our vendors and taught me a lot about doing the same.

If people in your company like Oracle support then you will probably be happy with it. If you don't have the skills in house to manage them maybe you won't.

As for K8s I think the live patching and Oracle optimization might not matter so much for you.

What is your company trying to accomplish by switching to Oracle Linux?

It was a management / accounting decision, no people with technical background have been consulted. We have been a RHEL shop so far and have 100s of servers that now need to be migrated. Additionally we have multiple K8s instances. We have just been told today, the deal has been signed and for the moment people are just panicking.

Re: the benefits - ask whoever made the decision in management/accounting to tell you how great the steak & strippers were.

Ah. That’s unfortunate. Some sales droid bought someone a fancy dinner it seems like.

Ah, I understand.

So what you're asking isn't information that could be used as part of a cost/benefit calculation, but more of a "this is happening, how do we make the best of it" question?

Oracle Linux is based on RHEL, and to the best of my knowledge isn't that different. I suspect that since you're a RHEL shop, you probably won't see as many problems as you may fear.

so you're better off with ledgr-K8snap have a look, floss weekly).