RHEL 7 and RHEL 5 need to be flipped in your meme.
Any large enterprise still running RHEL 5 in Prod (or even, yes, older RHEL versions) has fully accepted the risks and will grumble about supporting it, but go forward with whatever workarounds are necessary to keep the application running on it running. The RHEL 7 folks, however, are modern enough that the answer for any problem is “Upgrade to RHEL 9, because we know you can with some effort, because we don’t want to waste time on supporting something you should be able to upgrade away from”.
This is the game of chicken in a modern enterprise for app teams. If their application is critical enough to business continuity and they remain on RHEL 7 long enough, they too will join the select few applications in the org that either get a cash injection for an application rewrite to modern RHEL 9 or be enshrined next to the RHEL 5 apps still running with grumbling, but continued support.
In a perfect world these EOL unsupported OSes should be retired and replaced with modern supported version, but we’re talking about reality now which is what the modern enterprise is, and which is far far from the perfect world.
What’s blowing my mind about this entire thread is the “rewrite application to support RHEL9” thing I keep seeing. What the fuck applications are y’all running that are so tightly bound to the OS that they can’t handle library and/or kernel updates?
That’s what I’m thinking too but then remember my first corporate job where the application depended on an exact subversion of Java 8, no earlier and no later. This was in 2021. Knowing that company I’d bet they’re still rocking the same setup.
Rhel 5? I hope y’all are using microsegmentation and have a good firewall…JFC
IT installed a firewall between the legacy environment and everything else. Devs threw a fit and so the firewall was configured with a default allow rule. Security was last seen crying into their beer.