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Tag: rhel

  • Red Hat Woos Corporate Developers with Free Instances of RHEL

    Red Hat Woos Corporate Developers with Free Instances of RHEL

    Red Hat today launched an initiative intended to make a free distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) available to individual developers working within a corporate environment.

    Chris Wells, senior director of product marketing for RHEL, said the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers program will reduce the level of friction that developers of corporate applications might otherwise encounter.

    Red Hat already has a long-standing developer program that is structured around organizations rather than individual developers. Rather than needing to become part of a program set up by an internal IT organization in collaboration with Red Hat, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Business Developers program provides application developers with direct access to a repository through which they can download up to 25 physical, virtual or cloud-based instances of RHEL. Previously, Red Hat also made available a free personal RHEL license option to application developers.

    The overall goal is to not only encourage developers to build applications using RHEL but also reduce the level of friction that might occur when applications are deployed in production environments that are based on RHEL, said Wells. Otherwise, a DevOps team would have to migrate an application developed on another distribution of Linux to RHEL, he added.

    Red Hat now provides access to instances of RHEL that can be deployed using traditional package management tools or as an immutable container. That latter approach tends to especially appeal to individual developers who would rather rip and replace a set of containers versus trying to apply a patch each time a new RHEL update is made available, noted Wells.

    There are, of course, any number of additional commercial services that application developers can also subscribe to if needed, he added.

    As always, there is an ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of application developers. In the wake of changes made to how Red Hat makes its offerings available to organizations, Red Hat is now clearly trying to make sure that application developers are able to build applications on top of its operating system without incurring any cost.

    It’s not clear how many application developers are building software on top of RHEL, but should application developers opt for a different operating system, Red Hat is concerned those platforms might one day supplant RHEL in production environments. Red Hat is also hoping that DevOps teams will encourage developers to build applications on top of RHEL to streamline application deployments.

    Regardless of motivation, making it possible for application developers to self-service their own for building applications is generally a good thing as long as it complies with existing corporate standards. The challenge is that many application developers when it comes to tooling have a lot of personal preferences that often fall outside the scope of those standards.

    Each organization will, naturally, need to determine how much freedom of choice they want to provide application developers, realizing, of course, that most of them have the resources and skills required to set up their own application development environments. Fortunately, it’s also not too long before most of those developers also conclude they would prefer to have somebody else manage those environments on their behalf.

  • 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…)

  • Red Hat Enhances Insights to Simplify RHEL Management

    Red Hat Enhances Insights to Simplify RHEL Management

    This week at its Red Hat Summit event, Red Hat introduced an expanded set of capabilities to Red Hat Insights that simplify management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

    Managing Linux across the hybrid cloud is complex, and it’s made even more so because of current macroeconomic conditions and the challenge of finding and retaining highly skilled DevOps and IT professionals, said Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat.

    The enhanced Insights capabilities add a layer of abstraction to help reduce enterprise Linux complexity across the hybrid cloud and make RHEL management easier by lowering skill level requirements for managing Linux server estates, the company said.

    Using a single UI, entry-level systems administrators and IT support teams can access Red Hat Insights’ predictive analytics to identify potential bugs, misconfigurations or security vulnerabilities and remediate them. Systems administrators of all skill levels can detect, assess and push fixes for potential problems without a deep understanding of Linux management systems like Red Hat Satellite Server and without having to interact with the command line, the company said.

    These enhancements help organizations maintain services and systems even in uncertain macroeconomic times when hiring is constrained. Red Hat research also claimed that these enhanced capabilities enabled IT organizations to find IT issues up to 90% faster and remediate them nearly 66% faster across the hybrid cloud.

    A Red Hat Insights image builder service also helps lower the skills level needed to manage Linux estates by enabling IT teams to build standardized, optimized operating system images, including the creation of their own ‘golden images’ that adhere to organization-specific needs for security and compliance. These images can be deployed across public clouds, hybrid clouds, data centers and the edge using the same console.

    As the economic downturn continues, organizations are looking to do more with less and identify ways to make the most of the resources, talent and skillsets they already have. Red Hat is making the case for adding a layer of abstraction to allow less-highly-skilled IT and DevOps team members to contribute to managing Linux estates across hybrid, multi-cloud and edge deployments.

    “The demands of managing Linux across the hybrid cloud are stretching the ability of resource-constrained IT departments to keep pace,” said Hellekson in a statement. “CIOs need to be able to extend existing skillsets and lower the skill barriers for overseeing Linux estates, which is exactly what the management capabilities of Red Hat Insights are designed to do.”

  • Red Hat Adds Service to Customize RHEL Images

    Red Hat Adds Service to Customize RHEL Images

    Red Hat this week announced a public beta of an Image Builder service that streamlines the process of building customized instances of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system.

    Scott Herold, director of product management for RHEL at Red Hat, said the Image Builder service enables an IT team to define a “gold” template for each target deployment environment that only contains the RHEL code required. Initially, Image Builder is configured to default to build a minimal, recommended RHEL server image for Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) cloud services.

    Future updates to the service will add support for VMware vSphere platforms as well as downloadable images and installation media for physical servers, customized filesystem layouts and versions 9.0, 8.5, 8.4 and 7.9 of RHEL. The service itself is accessed via the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console that is currently being made available in beta.

    Herold said building or installing operating systems is often a slow, tedious and error-prone process that needs to be manually performed in a slightly different way for each platform. Each physical server or edge computing platform requires different configurations and workflows. As a result, the chances mistakes will be made is high; Image Builder can greatly reduce the possibility of mistakes because there is no guesswork required, noted Herold.

    IT teams can also opt to include additional content from Red Hat in those builds to further streamline deployment processes, noted Herold. Those images can then be automatically registered with Red Hat to ensure future updates are received.

    The ability to customize those images also serves to reduce the overall size of the codebase that needs to be secured, added Herold. At a time when there is increased focus on software supply chains in the wake of a series of high-profile security breaches, many IT teams are revisiting their software deployment processes, he noted.

    Ultimately, Herold said Red Hat is moving toward providing IT teams with a more cloud-like experience regardless of where they deploy Red Hat’s curated open source software. The goal is to reduce as much friction as possible so that IT teams can more easily manage infrastructure at scale, he added.

    One way or another, the entiree software deployment process is becoming more automated. Much of the drudgery that has historically made it challenging to deploy and manage IT platforms at scale can be traced back to manual processes created when organizations ran a much smaller number of applications in on-premises IT environments. As IT teams increasingly deploy more applications in the cloud and at the network edge, it’s become more apparent that manual legacy processes won’t scale—especially when it’s already challenging to hire and retain IT personnel.

    It’s not clear how quickly IT teams will modernize software deployment processes using automated DevOps processes. Simple inertia is often a powerful force to overcome; however, most IT professionals can easily find something more compelling to do with their time that doesn’t involve using manually customizing operating system images.

  • 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.”

     

  • 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.