Introduction

Rocky Linux 9 is a bug-by-bug clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9). We generally recommend using RHEL 9 for mission-critical workloads, but for less important services Rocky Linux 9 is a very good choice if you’re in the Red Hat land already. Official Rocky images are only available in AWS Marketplace, which complicates things when you need to programmatically determine the latest version. This is a common requirement when you do infrastructure as code, for example with Ansible, Terraform or Packer. Although we speak of latest Rocky Linux AMI here, everything in here is applicable for any other AWS Marketplace images, for example Alma Linux.

Introduction

Upcloud is a Finnish Cloud provider that focuses on high-quality services. There is no built-in support for installing RHEL on Upcloud, which is quite typical of “small Clouds”. Sometimes you don’t want to use clones (e.g. Rocky Linux) and need real RHEL instead. This is where this article comes handy, as the RHEL installation process in Upcloud is far from trivial. This article focuses on RHEL 9, but the process may work with older and newer versions as well. The process I describe here applies almost 1:1 to any Linux operating system Upcloud does not natively support.

What follows is an minimalistic, bare-bones guide to get you started with Red Hat subscriptions quickly. No spoon-feeding, no introductions, just get your first RHEL* system into a blessed state quickly, while your attention can still keep up. 

We assume you are starting from scratch and generally have no glue. We also assume that your boss has punished you with this task, not your mom, and therefore you represent a company, not a Sapiens specimen that looks like you. If this is not the case, then it isn’t.

Scaling a mountain is about as easy as to install RHEL 9 in Hetzner Cloud in scalable way. At minimum, you need this article and lots of endurance to pull it off. Photo credit.

Introduction

Hetzner Cloud is a really good “small” Cloud with particularly good value for money. While it does not have hundreds of services like AWS or Azure, but it has most of the basic stuff. Hetzner cloud has built-in support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clones such as Rocky Linux 9. However, you cannot spin up real RHEL 9 instances without spending some time on it. This article will give you all the details you need to install RHEL 9 on Hetzner Cloud. We do that in a way that you can reuse your RHEL 9 installation to spin up multiple servers from one snapshot. This way you don’t have to run the RHEL installer for every RHEL server you want to spin up.

Puppeteers has started a collaboration with Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions. This collaboration marks Puppeteers as a member of the Red Hat partner ecosystem, where it brings its expertise in automation and open-source technologies to the forefront.

Today, organizations across various sectors are under immense pressure to deliver services quickly while upholding stringent security practices. Information technology is pivotal in meeting these demands, and automation offers a compelling solution to address challenges related to scalability, predictability, and efficiency. Red Hat, renowned for its automation solutions, is at the forefront of helping organizations navigate these challenges.

What are Ansible modules?

Ansible modules provide the infrastructure as code building blocks for your Ansible roles, plays and playbooks. Modules manage things such as packages, files and services. The scope of a module is typically quite narrow: it does one thing but attempts to do it well. Writing custom Ansible modules is not particularly difficult. The first step is to solve the problem with raw Python, then you can convert that Python code to an Ansible module

Automation use-cases in the Cloud

Johan Wennerberg, a Solution Architect for Red Hat Nordics in Stockholm gave presentation in Red Hat Open Tour 2022 Tallinn. In his presentation titled “Gain robust repeatability as selfservice, by automating your automation” he listed several automation use-cases in the Cloud. Each of these automation use-cases is made possible by automation stacks. The automation stacks are technology stacks that produce business value through automation. In practice you need to build your automation stacks on top of infrastructure as code.

We participated in Red Hat Open Tour 2022 Tallinn a while back. Johan Wennerberg, who is a Solution Architect for Red Hat Nordics in Stockholm, gave a presentation titled “Gain robust repeatability as self.service, by automating your automation”. Among other things he discussed the importance and use-cases of Cloud infrastructure standardization and automation. Here I willsummarize his views on standardization and automation and explain how they tie in with our focus on quality in the Cloud infrastructure and elsewhere.

We’re using the centos/7 base box in Vagrant a lot and often hit this problem when bringing up new VMs with Vagrant:

umount: /mnt: not mounted

This error comes from vagrant-vbguest plugin which tried to install the Virtualbox Guest Additions but failed. The error message is misleading, because the real issue is related to upstream (CentOS) yum repositories. As explained in this Vagrant bug report:

“Basically the CentOS that you’re installing is containing an old kernel version which has been removed from CentOS repositories. Vagrant is trying to install Guest Additions, which has as a dependency the kernel-devel package. kernel-devel package must be the same version as the kernel package that you have it installed in your CentOS box, version which is removed from the CentOS repos.”