devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: CentOS

  • The Great CentOS Linux Migration: How We Got Here and What’s Next

    The Great CentOS Linux Migration: How We Got Here and What’s Next

    The recent news regarding Red Hat’s decision to limit access to the source code of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution has garnered considerable attention. In order to understand the ramifications and subsequent changes, it is important to look back at CentOS, its historical alignment with RHEL and the options moving forward.

    CentOS Then and Now

    Starting in 2004, right from its inception, every iteration of the commercial RHEL offering triggered a corresponding release of CentOS. These iterations mirrored RHEL, albeit with modifications to eliminate the Red Hat branding and other minor updates. The presence of open source CentOS Linux facilitated swift installation of a free RHEL variant, rendering it accessible for diverse purposes spanning from development to production environments.

    In January 2014, Red Hat joined the CentOS project. Under a new CentOS governing board, they became the main sponsor and driver of the CentOS project. They continued to be an open source downstream alternative to RHEL.

    On December 8, 2020, the CentOS project and Red Hat set a new end-of-life (EOL) date for CentOS Linux 8. They shifted focus and investment into a new Linux distribution, CentOS Stream, with a rolling release model. EOL means that the community stops releases regardless of the severity of a bug or a vulnerability. Today, CentOS versions 6 and 8 are already EOL, and version 7 is the last, with EOL set for June 30, 2024. This announcement immediately sparked new projects to fill the CentOS gap. New open source projects such as Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux took off quickly, gaining contributors, sponsors and users.

    Fast forward to June 21, 2023, when Red Hat announced it would no longer publicly publish RHEL on git.centos.org.

    Previously, the source code was accessible to all, and it was used by various RHEL-compatible alternative open source projects such as Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. It also affected other distributions, including Oracle Linux, which was a RHEL derivative for many years. All of these open source Linux distributions offered an alternative for applications; they were equally compatible with both free open source Linux and the commercial RHEL offering.

    According to the 2023 State of Open Source Report, 15% of all organizations and 20% of large organizations globally still have CentOS Linux deployed in their environments. Organizations have to move off EOL CentOS 6 and 8 and, in less than a year, off CentOS 7. Running EOL versions of any software can pose a substantial risk and cause failure in IT internal and external compliance. New vulnerabilities are constantly disclosed, and without updates or patches to CentOS, it is critical to plan for the “Great CentOS Linux Migration.”

    CentOS Migration Planning and Challenges

    Migration can be challenging. If organizations have legacy applications, they might encounter significant challenges making them work properly on a different Linux distribution. Even a small change in the individual packages that form the Linux distribution can impact and delay testing. While every application is different, and many are not dependent on low-level Linux functions, others could be significantly impacted. The number of CentOS deployments and applications has an exponential impact on the migration efforts. Evaluating different Linux distributions also takes time and will depend on the use cases, the skills developers have within each organization and the results of testing. The actual installation of a new Linux distribution is the easy part—the testing of all the layers on top of the operating system is what will take time. Some might be straightforward while others will require significant changes. Those are the reasons why it is helpful to stay with compatible distributions that will minimize the migration challenges.

    As organizations navigate the CentOS EOL and the migration period, it will be helpful to find options to extend CentOS long-term support. This means finding the expertise to generate patches that address newly disclosed high-severity vulnerabilities post-EOL. In other words, organizations must expand the community’s long-term support to address security.

    Wait for What’s Next

    The biggest question about alternative distributions is how closely they resemble RHEL. Are they going to continue to be bug-for-bug compatible? Or are there enough differences to no longer consider them application-compatible? The Rocky Linux Enterprise Software Foundation announced its plan to access RHEL source code and its intentions to continue to be bug-for-bug compatible. AlmaLinux OS Foundation announced a different approach. It is working with the CentOS Stream community while maintaining binary compatibility. This means not strictly bug-for-bug but focusing on applications to continue to be compatible.

    It is possible we’ll see other potential changes from Red Hat with regard to the access to RHEL’s source code. Today, it’s only available to customers under a commercial license agreement.

    The big test will be the next minor version, RHEL 9.3. It will be interesting to review the corresponding 9.3 versions of Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Oracle and others, including SUSE, who announced their intention to offer an open source compatible Linux distribution. The analysis and comparison of how applications run with the new minor version will reveal how close they are to RHEL.

    To mitigate uneasiness, organizations have to plan and test alternatives. Finding post-EOL support and patches will allow organizations to have a runway for migrating CentOS to different Linux distributions.

    As everyone in the industry with CentOS deployments waits for the next release or the next few releases, extending long-term support becomes a very viable solution. It is wise to make sure security and IT compliance aspects are addressed. Perhaps more open source Linux distributions will appear in the near future and offer another alternative to CentOS Linux.

  • Forking RHEL! Oracle and SUSE Join the Fight ¦ Silverman Sues AI Firms

    Forking RHEL! Oracle and SUSE Join the Fight ¦ Silverman Sues AI Firms

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: SUSE announces a Red Hat Enterprise Linux fork after Oracle said a similar thing, and Sarah Silverman says OpenAI and Meta have stolen her words. (more…)

  • IBM/Red Hat Sparks Anger at GPL ‘breach’ as RHEL Source Locked Up

    IBM/Red Hat Sparks Anger at GPL ‘breach’ as RHEL Source Locked Up

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) goes closed source. Well—no, not really; but IBM’s lawyers are accused of skating so close to the edge of legality that they risk violating the GNU Public License. (more…)

  • Rocky Linux Emerges as a CentOS Replacement

    Rocky Linux Emerges as a CentOS Replacement

    Rocky Linux was created to offer the community an alternative following Red Hat’s recent decision to shift its focus away from CentOS—the open source version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). However, the Linux distro’s popularly can also be attributed to how its creator sought to offer a superior alternative based on lessons learned during CentOS’ development—and less as a perceived backlash to Red Hat’s controversial move, said Gregory Kurtzer, Rocky Linux’s creator, who is also founder and CEO of Ctrl IQ.

    “As one can probably imagine, there were a lot of lessons learned from the founding of CentOS—we did a lot of things correctly, but we made some mistakes, as well, that set into motion some of the difficulties the project went through,” said Kurtzer. “I was not—nor am I now—upset at Red Hat or anyone else. It’s important to understand that companies have a legal responsibility to do what they need to do. But I will say, this is why open source communities should not be controlled by a single company, especially if that company has a competing product to the open source project.”

    In addition to applying experience gained from the CentOS project to help “recreate the initial goals of CentOS in a new project,” Kurtzer said he was prompted to create Rocky Linux following Red Hat’s decision to end-of-life (EOL) CentOS. The move “affected my company, our customers, as well as the entire industry,” said Kurtzer.

    “To be blunt, my knowledge—in terms of doing it myself is severely dated. Luckily, after I made the announcement that I was considering recreating CentOS, thousands of people reached out to me wanting to be part of the project and contribute,” said Kurtzer. “From that, our development team and open source community was born.”

    Additionally, CentOS Stream offers value to the community by allowing “us and others” to take part in developing the upstream Enterprise Linux standard, said Kurtzer, who added that his team will continue to debug Rocky Linux so that solutions are properly integrated into the Enterprise Linux Standard.

    “The necessity was absolutely clear, so I founded Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF),” Kurtzer explained. “Together with our contributors, sponsors and partners, we all have united for a common goal: to create an open source community that will provide us all with an enterprise operating system to stand the test of time, attrition and commercial agendas.”

    Interest in the development of a CentOS alternative was strong when Kurtzer first floated the idea of the project to the community. Since its release in June, the total number of ISO downloads is 56,000, according to Rocky Linux Tier0 mirror data.

    “We have zero visibility as to any other ISO downloads from any of our other mirrors, but if I were to guess, I’d say it would be about two to three times more, in total,” said Kurtzer. “When we all get a moment to breathe, it will be fun to see how many people are using Rocky Linux, and take in all the feedback the community has provided,” he said.

    With this team of developers,  Kurtzer said it took about seven months to build the general availability  (GA) release. “We didn’t just jump right into building the operating system because the goal was to create an infrastructure where many contributors and developers can take part without putting the security of the product at risk. Building that infrastructure took about four months,” Kurtzer said. “Once the infrastructure was completed, we spent about two months building the first-release beta candidate and then spent the following month ensuring that we did everything correctly.”

     

  • Red Hat Expands RHEL Subscription Program for Developers

    Red Hat Expands RHEL Subscription Program for Developers

    Red Hat is extending its developer program to make it simpler for both individual developers and small teams to access a free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system subscription.

    These programs are launched in the wake of Red Hat’s decision to no longer invest in an open source CentOS Linux distribution project. Many developers employ CentOS to build applications that are later deployed on RHEL in a production environment.

    Starting in February, an existing no-cost Individual Developer subscription for RHEL can be used in production for up to 16 systems in an on-premises environment or in the cloud. Previously, developers were limited to using the subscription on a single machine. Red Hat is also making it easier for teams of developers to join this program at no additional cost via an existing subscription their organization may already have.

    In place of CentOS, Red Hat is positioning the CentOS Stream as a hub through which development teams will gain access to a continuously updated Linux distribution that will become the next minor update to RHEL. The Fedora project, managed by Red Hat, will continue to exist as the vehicle through which the RHEL community experiments with major innovations.

    Brian Exelbierd, head of RHEL community projects, said these changes should ultimately prove to be a boon to DevOps teams, as they will better align the instances of applications being developed with existing instances of RHEL running in production environments. Historically, there was a significant amount of effort required on the part of DevOps teams to move an application developed on CentOS to RHEL, said Exelbierd.

    At least two other entities have rushed to fill the perceived CentOS gap. Gregory Kurtzer, one of the co-founders of CentOS, along with the support of more than 650 contributors, has launched Rocky Linux to make sure IT organizations have access to a fork of RHEL without a subscription. At the same time, CloudLinux is pledging to spend $1 million annually to create a distribution of Linux, dubbed Project Lenix, that is also based on a fork of RHEL. CloudLinux previously provided a hardened edition of CentOS that has been installed more than 200,000 times by 4,000-plus customers.

    Exelbierd said Red Hat is not trying to subvert those efforts, but it does have a vested interest in making it simpler for developers to build applications that eventually get deployed on production systems. Red Hat only generates revenue when organizations pay to subscribe to an instance of RHEL that gets deployed in a production environment.

    Regardless of what operating system developers employ, unless organizations decide to deploy CentOS in production environments, all paths eventually lead to RHEL. It will be interesting to see how far organizations will go in supporting a fork of RHEL that, in many cases, was employed simply because a developer didn’t want to pay for full subscription.

  • CentOS Rebellion Against Red Hat Gains Momentum

    CentOS Rebellion Against Red Hat Gains Momentum

    Two insurgent efforts to make sure the CentOS distribution remains viable have been launched following a decision by Red Hat to no longer invest in that fork of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution.

    Launched in 2006, CentOS is widely employed by IT organizations that need an open source distribution of Linux to, for example, deploy a web server. Red Hat gained control over the CentOS trademark in 2014 as the primary sponsor of the project. Starting next year, Red Hat will only support CentOS Stream, which provides IT teams with a “rolling preview” of capabilities the company plans to make available on RHEL. Both RHEL and CentOS Stream are available via a subscription from Red Hat.

    The backlash to that announcement has been swift. Gregory Kurtzer, one of the co-founders of CentOS, has launched Rocky Linux with the support of more than 650 contributors to make sure IT organizations have access to a distribution of a fork of RHEL that doesn’t require a subscription.

    Kurtzer said many of those contributors work at independent software vendors (ISVs) that would prefer to see forks of RHEL continue to be available to their customers. Ultimately, the goal will be to add new capabilities to a Linux distribution in a more agile manner than what has occurred under the stewardship of Red Hat, added Kurtzer.

    At the same time, CloudLinux is pledging to spend $1 million annually to create a distribution of Linux dubbed Project Lenix that is also based on a fork of RHEL. CloudLinux has previously provided a hardened edition of CentOS that has been installed more than 200,000 times by 4,000-plus customers.

    CloudLinux CEO Igor Seletskiy noted the only other existing RHEL-compatible distribution of Linux is Oracle Linux. However, given Oracle’s stewardship of the open source MySQL and database, and the way the transition to open source editions of Java technologies has progressed, Seletskiy said there are many in the open source community who would prefer an alternative.

    As for the Rocky Linux effort, Seletskiy said Project Lenix not only will appear sooner but also IT teams will be able to convert entire fleets of servers over to it via a single command with no reinstallation or reboot required.

    Red Hat can do little to quell these initiatives because RHEL itself is based on open source code that anyone can employ to create a separate distribution. It’s not clear what impact this nascent rebellion will have on the ability of Red Hat to further monetize RHEL; however, it does illustrate how difficult it really is for a provider of any open source code to maintain control over the community that evolves around a given project.

    Many contributors to these projects are also becoming resentful of vendors that productize their efforts by converting open source software into, for example, a cloud service or subscription service that goes on to be the dominant means through which open source software is consumed. As a result, there is increased pressure for vendors to find a way to better reward contributors to these projects. Initiatives such as Rocky Linux and Project Lenix are clearly tapping into an egalitarian spirit within the open source community that runs counter to the way some vendors monetize these initiatives.

    It’s not clear to what degree these two efforts might inspire other revolts based on forks of open source code. However, it’s clear that the stewards of the primary open source project may not be the complete masters of their domain regardless of who may own the trademark for a specific distribution.

  • Red Hat Streamlines Operating System Update Cycle

    Red Hat Streamlines Operating System Update Cycle

    Red Hat is looking to make it easier for DevOps teams to absorb leading-edge innovations as they are slipstreamed into a new distribution of CentOS.

    CentOS is a distribution of Linux based on a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The team that oversees CentOS operates independently of Red Hat. That team in collaboration with Red Hat is making available an additional distribution dubbed CentOS Stream, through which a continuous stream of content will be updated several times daily.

    Mike McGrath, senior director for Linux engineering at Red Hat, said those innovations eventually will find their way into RHEL, but until then developers who want to build applications using those features as they become available can use CentOS Stream.

    This latest distribution of Linux from Red Hat is intended to act as a bridge between Fedora, a distribution of Linux through which Red Hat makes available experimental technologies, and RHEL, he said.

    McGrath said developers have been asking for a more stable distribution of Linux that provides access to innovations that are likely to be incorporated in RHEL, which so many IT organizations today deploy in production environments. CentOS Stream will make it easier for developers to take advantage of those new capabilities a lot sooner than they can today, he noted.

    CentOS Stream will be maintained in parallel to CentOS, which means organizations that have decided to standardize on CentOS are not going to be impacted by updates to CentOS Stream.

    As more organizations subscribe to software, version numbers associated with any software platform are becoming less relevant. Many DevOps teams especially want to be able to take advantage of new capabilities within the context of a continuous integration process when and if they see fit, rather than waiting for a formal update of a piece of software to be released.

    It will be interesting to see how many IT organizations embrace CentOS Stream at a time when many of them are under increased pressure to build innovative applications faster. In many instances, those innovations are dependent on features and capabilities embedded in the operating system, so waiting for those capabilities to show up in a major RHEL upgrade isn’t especially helpful. Many developers want to be able to exploit those capabilities the minute they are certified to run on RHEL. In many cases, developers are gaining access to those features only a few short months ahead of time whenever a preview edition of the next version of RHEL is made available.

    Eventually, every software platform provider will need to come up with some similar approach to CentOS Stream to provide developers with early access to new capabilities. In many cases, developers already have access to next-generation features if they have a close relationship with the platform provider. However, the process for making new capabilities available to developers remains haphazard at best.

    — Mike Vizard