Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'
- Reference: 1608629413
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/22/red_hat_defends_its_centos/
- Source link:
CentOS Linux is downstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), whereas CentOS Stream, introduced in September 2019, is upstream, a late development build of what will shortly go into RHEL (unless problems are discovered).
All CentOS variants are free, and CentOS Linux is understandably popular, combining the stability of RHEL with free availability. For example, according to [1]statistics from W3Techs CentOS has an 18.5 per cent share of websites, compared to Red Hat's 1.5 per cent share. Earlier this month Red Hat [2]declared that CentOS Linux would be phased out in favour of Stream.
Wade [3]explained the necessity for CentOS Stream as a way of making it easier for the community to contribute to RHEL. He also said that "as a project, trying to do two antithetical things at once would mean doing both poorly," implying this was the reason for the abandonment of CentOS Linux.
He confirmed the decision was driven by Red Hat, which "approached the CentOS Project with its plan" but said "the CentOS Board signed on to it."
Acknowledging that the lack of CentOS Linux creates an "availability gap," Wade nevertheless said he is confident that Stream can cover "95 per cent (or so) of current user workloads" and referred to a [4]post by Stef Walter, Director of Linux Engineering, which described Stream as RHEL with a continuous delivery model, stating: "The whole point of continuous delivery is to make each release as stable as the one before."
Wade also said Red Hat will make additional solutions available – presumably meaning more affordable licensing for RHEL in some scenarios.
Is concern about doing two things badly really the reason for scrapping CentOS Linux, or is it an attempt to sell more RHEL licences? The community is not convinced by Wade's argument that the two are antithetical.
There is particular upset that CentOS 8 support has been curtailed. "People are complaining because you are suddenly killing CentOS 8 which has been released last year with the promise of binary compatibility to RHEL 8 and security updates until 2029," said a [5]comment on Wade's post.
Maintaining an open source project such as RHEL involves a complex balance of commercial and community considerations. Red Hat's success has hinged on its ability to manage this. Red Hat builds on work freely given by others; equally those who build free distributions from the work of Red Hat engineers are in a sense riding on that commercially-supported input. When we asked Hayden Young, part of the team for the would-be CentOS replacement Rocky Linux, how if at all Red Hat would benefit from the fork, he said that "In some respects, we don't give much back to them at all … but I think we're creating a project that's going to make people say, I like this, the paid one is probably going to give me so much more."
The difficulty for Red Hat is that while from a commercial perspective it may hurt to support a project that creates a free alternative to its main commercial product, the risk is that without CentOS Linux, users will shift to alternatives to RHEL as well.
"I have over 300,000 Centos nodes that require Long term support as it's impossible to turn them over rapidly. I also have 154,000 RHEL nodes. I now have to migrate 454,000 nodes over to Ubuntu because Redhat just made the dumbest decision short of letting IBM acquire them I've seen … nothing like millions in lost revenue from a single customer," said [6]another commenter on the post .
Making major changes to an open source ecosystem that works is not without peril. ®
Get our [7]Tech Resources
[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/09/centos_red_hat/
[3] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/balancing-the-needs-around-the-centos-platform/
[4] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/centos-stream-is-continuous-delivery/
[5] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/balancing-the-needs-around-the-centos-platform/#comment-184664]/
[6] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/balancing-the-needs-around-the-centos-platform/#comment-184734
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: The RedHat corporate spinners won't fix this
Couple of general questions:
How easy do you find it to switch between distros?
How different are they in functionality and use?
Genuine question, I work mostly with Windows but have a couple of Ubuntu servers running in Azure.
Re: How to switch?
Something like this:-
dnf install centos-release-stream
followed by a
dnf update.
Then your /etc/redhat-release will read: CentOS Stream release 8
Not tried it yet but it isn't ecactly difficult.
Re: How to switch?
You missed the "fix anything that broke" step
Soemtimes that takes almost no time, other times you just end up rolling back.
Re: How to switch?
I think you are misreading AMBxx's question.
By my reading they are asking how to move away from the RH/Centos world and move to a totally new distro.
From my limited experience of running different distros I would say that it can make a lot of difference. The use of .deb or .rpm for a start. Then there are the various inits available. Do you want systemd, SysVinit, OpenRC and so on? Add in a difference in file systems not to mention the Xorg/Wayland choice and you can soon find yourself struggling to make sense of it all.
A lot of due diligence and research would be needed to make sure that the transitions is as painless as possible.
This is not something to be undertaken lightly.
Re: The RedHat corporate spinners won't fix this
90% of the difference on a server is the package manager (yum vs apt), the rest is rather minor. A few differences in default packages, and a few different configuration helper programs. Maybe also a few differences in how they structure larger service configurations, like the nginx folder.
Switching difficulty is down to how you use it. If you're just using e.g. a web server with PHP, it's pretty simple, especially if you have no special configurations. Just install the new server and copy over your stuff (this is definitely the best way for cloud services, if you're looking to do auto instantiations, where setting up a new server must be scripted).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the more complicated your setup and customizations, the more trouble changing is, and the more you will realise the differences.
Re: The RedHat corporate spinners won't fix this
I have changed between distro's more often than I want to count. I have used Ubuntu, SUSE, Redhat, Centos, Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Devuan, YellowDog and more, along with HP-UX, Solaris and AIX. Mainly because the distribution was chosen for the task at hand, or was vendor supplied.
I look at the different distro's as different accents. Cockney and Glaswegian are two very different accents, but they use the same underlying language. If you moved from Glasgow to London, you may have some initial difficulties with unfamiliar expressions, but you will quickly become used to the local lingo. Same when swapping distro. It doesn't take long to find your feet.
So much spin I'm getting dizzy
And, of course, this has nothing to do with trying to force more people to switch to paid offerings.
a way of making it easier for the community to contribute to RHEL
Oh thanks IBM, you're just doing this out of the kindness of your blessed hearts to enable us to fulfill our lifelong dreams of making your sold-for-money product better. How generous of you.
you could just
Perhaps just stop panicking, donate some time/money/resoruces to one of the replacement builds (like rocky) and carry on.....
The RedHat corporate spinners won't fix this
They should have a law against old dying dinosaurs buying up innovative companies just to take them down in their death struggle.
The news just broke in time for steering away from using CentOS 8 for a major project, using Ubuntu instead.
The world is an ironic place, Open-Source enabled startups like google, facebook and AWS to grow exponentially without going bankrupt on paying MS their CAL's.
Little they return to the Open-Source world, maybe one of them could make good on the false promises of RedHat and maintain a good distro for company use that doesn't cost and arm and a leg for small businesses.