I have government contractors specify versions of Red Hat and they will not support other distributions. Of course, these vendors also specify versions of Windows Server that Microsoft recommends you no longer run.
Partly you have enterprise software from big vendors like Dell or Alcatel that is packaged for RHEL.
You have hardware vendors like Dell and HPE who only offer support for supported OS. And yes I know CentOS is not a supported OS but its binary compatibility with RHEL meant you always had the option of migrating it to RHEL and get support.
Also I have government clients who require SLA with support contracts on the systems. In those cases, given the arguments above, including years of experience, RHEL has more weight than Canonical or Suse.
And besides all that, I'm actually a SElinux fanboy. I've had a lot of upgrade issues on Debian in the past and some clients even require certain yum features like history and rollback for patching.
That said, I tend to use whatever is the right tool. I tend to look at how a service is designed to decide which distro to use. Of course I prefer homogenous environments but for example I'd rather put a stable CentOS as a webfront/TLS terminator and a bleeding edge Fedora as an application server for things like Node or Python.
So in the future I would not rule out using Debian Stable as web front instead.
There is a whole smorgasbord of entrenched application servers/software that are targeted mainly at the RHEL ecosystem. These would have a very difficult time transitioning to non-RHEL.
How do updates/security updates look on C7/C8 until then? Assuming you don’t have any C8? Otherwise, stable updates are going to be problematic converting those to Stream, no? Also, I wouldn’t myself count on Red Hat not welching on that C7 2024 EOL date. I can’t see them not pushing that up honestly.
As far as whether CentOS was a success or not, of course it was a massive success. The circumstances of its unnaturally accelerated death don’t change its wild popularity/usage/prevalence.
I have several Kubernetes clusters, Postgres and Mariadb clusters on CentOS 7. I'm not worried about updates, at least not until 2023. I am not going to put any money on Stream right now. It's just too unstable.
In fact, we're a RedHat partner so I'd rather migrate to RHEL. But of course management love me when I save money. :)
And I'm not worried about migrating C7 to a new distro either, as long as the cluster software is the same you can add new nodes and remove old ones gradually.
My knee jerk reaction to CentOS dying was horror but now I'm much more relaxed.
How do updates/security updates look on C7/C8 until then? Assuming you don’t have any C8? Otherwise, stable updates are going to be problematic converting those to Stream, no? Also, I wouldn’t myself count on Red Hat not welching on that C7 2024 EOL date. I can’t see them not pushing that up honestly.
Given that C8 was supposed to be supported into 2029[0] and then they cut it to 2021, that does seem plausible enough...
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I'm responsible for fairly critical infrastructure and I've been putting all my bets on RHEL/CentOS these last 7 years.
So my plan is to just sit back and watch how all this develops until 2023. Use RHEL when possible, Fedora or CentOS 7. Worst case maybe CentOS Stream.
But there is no rush. Just sit back and let time decide which of these new contenders looks the best after 2 years.
Is RHEL compatibility a must? At this point it feels like the only community solution that has a long term track record is Debian.
I have government contractors specify versions of Red Hat and they will not support other distributions. Of course, these vendors also specify versions of Windows Server that Microsoft recommends you no longer run.
Yes, as others have pointed out already.
Partly you have enterprise software from big vendors like Dell or Alcatel that is packaged for RHEL.
You have hardware vendors like Dell and HPE who only offer support for supported OS. And yes I know CentOS is not a supported OS but its binary compatibility with RHEL meant you always had the option of migrating it to RHEL and get support.
Also I have government clients who require SLA with support contracts on the systems. In those cases, given the arguments above, including years of experience, RHEL has more weight than Canonical or Suse.
And besides all that, I'm actually a SElinux fanboy. I've had a lot of upgrade issues on Debian in the past and some clients even require certain yum features like history and rollback for patching.
That said, I tend to use whatever is the right tool. I tend to look at how a service is designed to decide which distro to use. Of course I prefer homogenous environments but for example I'd rather put a stable CentOS as a webfront/TLS terminator and a bleeding edge Fedora as an application server for things like Node or Python.
So in the future I would not rule out using Debian Stable as web front instead.
There is a whole smorgasbord of entrenched application servers/software that are targeted mainly at the RHEL ecosystem. These would have a very difficult time transitioning to non-RHEL.
How do updates/security updates look on C7/C8 until then? Assuming you don’t have any C8? Otherwise, stable updates are going to be problematic converting those to Stream, no? Also, I wouldn’t myself count on Red Hat not welching on that C7 2024 EOL date. I can’t see them not pushing that up honestly.
As far as whether CentOS was a success or not, of course it was a massive success. The circumstances of its unnaturally accelerated death don’t change its wild popularity/usage/prevalence.
I have several Kubernetes clusters, Postgres and Mariadb clusters on CentOS 7. I'm not worried about updates, at least not until 2023. I am not going to put any money on Stream right now. It's just too unstable.
In fact, we're a RedHat partner so I'd rather migrate to RHEL. But of course management love me when I save money. :)
And I'm not worried about migrating C7 to a new distro either, as long as the cluster software is the same you can add new nodes and remove old ones gradually.
My knee jerk reaction to CentOS dying was horror but now I'm much more relaxed.
Given that C8 was supposed to be supported into 2029[0] and then they cut it to 2021, that does seem plausible enough...
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.cent...