[Darth-Apple]

Given that millions of web servers depend on CentOS, this one is going to make some fairly deep waves in the industry. CentOS will no longer be a free version on RHEL (sans the enterprise support). The version as we know it is going to be discontinued in 2021. (It will be replaced with CentOS stream, a rolling release model unsuitable for server environments). 

This is hugely disappointing news for some. CPanel and many other options are designed specifically with CentOS in mind, and although they are recently being made compatible with other options, CentOS/RHEL is still the preferred, tested, and uniquely stable option. The natural alternative is Ubuntu Server, and it’s a worthy replacement (and is my server OS of choice, personally). They are roughly equivalent and both have vibrant camps of users. However, CentOS and Ubuntu do a number of things differently. Dev Ops engineers tend to stick with what they are more familiar with, and CentOS has a very good reputation for stability in the industry.  

What are your thoughts? Is this going to push more to use Ubuntu Server, or will people find other alternatives? 

https://www.debugpoint.com/2020/12/cento...ouncement/

[Guardian]

Bad move for everyone, except Red hat. CentOS was growing in popularity, so Red Hat had to buy them up. Now they've effectively killed it. Red Hat is just trying to increase market share for their paid products.

Its a warning sign for everyone that if their favorite free open-source product is bought up by a paid-vendor, to start looking to migrate away from it immediately.

[Darth-Apple]

Exactly.

It’s likely to backfire quite a bit. CentOS/RHEL are attractive because they are hugely popular and have massive communities that have been built up for decades. If someone runs into an issue, there is a huge community of people who are instantly ready to help. And this is important for their RPM based packages too. Nobody is going to bother making separate RPM binaries (for non-mainstream software) if there aren’t many users to take advantage of them.

Cutting off CentOS shrinks the very user base that helps to make the RHEL community so attractive to begin with. The enterprise users will be fine anyway, but for those who use it for more generic purposes, they just made CentOS/RHEL a fringe solution.

It’s going to be a big fall for an OS that has dominated the server landscape for many years. As you say, it’s a warning sign. Hopefully Ubuntu remains safe.

Edit: so interestingly enough, Oracle Linux looks to be a rising star in the RHEL-compatible OS sphere. It’s 100% binary compatible and is basically almost identical (minus the kernel itself), so a lot of people are considering switching.

[Thomas]

This is crazy tbh. I know Ubuntu has really made big strides in the server landscape, but Centos was always the distro to go to for stability (and not paying for rhel). I'm sure someone's going to fork it... hopefully.

[Guardian]

Haven't used Oracle Linux. Might have to check it out.

[Darth-Apple]

Much agreed. Oracle Linux is interesting. I might have to check it out a lot more in the coming weeks.

I've used CentOS before, but I was too unfamiliar with it at the time and Ubuntu was where my experience was. But the stability is quite attractive. Apparently Oracle's Kernel is renowned in the industry, and evidently it is very similar to CentOS and RHEL (to the point that it is 100% binary compatible and uses almost identical repositories). Might have to check it out, it's going to get HUGE if cPanel continues to use RHEL derivatives as the preferred distro.

@Thomas: Yea, Ubuntu's 5 year support cycle is very good, but it can't compete with CentOS' 10 year cycle. I know of PLENTY of servers still running Ubuntu 16.04, so the support cycle definitely still matters.

[campingrhino]

I may be wrong but does that mean that there won't be a free of charge OS that supports cPanel now on?

[s3_gunzel]

The good people at CPanel, with their metal business cards, are currently slitting their wrists.

That'll learn them for only using CentOS won't it?

I may be wrong but does that mean that there won't be a free of charge OS that supports cPanel now on?

Pray god they adapt and allow Debian. Screw it make the installer a .deb

[Darth-Apple]

CPanel very recently started supporting Debian (and unofficially some of its derivatives such as Ubuntu). It’s very likely that it’s not nearly as stable as the CentOS versions, but that’s probably going to change when people flock to Debian in the coming months.

Everyone in the server sphere is absolutely pissed. Red Hat literally bought out CentOS (previously a privately maintained fork), promised 10 year support, and then nixed it. Presumably to get rid of competition? Who knows, because their official “explanations” are pretty much BS.

And I mean, I get it. It’s a for profit company and they gotta do what they gotta do. But CentOS was huge. It was just a pretty trash move all around to kill an existing, privately maintained fork by swallowing it and then pulling the trigger on it. it’s going to end up backfiring in the long run.

Oracle is going to gain MASSIVE market share as a result of this. And the original founder of CentOS just rebooted it under “Rocky Linux” - so it looks like it will be replaced by other RHEL based alternatives very quickly in the coming days.

Edit: Red Hat is being quite shady, more so than previously thought. This article sheds quite a bit of light on what they’ve been up to. I’ve pretty much lost all respect for them at this point. This isn’t the spirit of the open source community.  https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/12/...s_red_hat/

[Guardian]

Edit: Red Hat is being quite shady, more so than previously thought. This article sheds quite a bit of light on what they’ve been up to. I’ve pretty much lost all respect for them at this point. This isn’t the spirit of the open source community.  https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/12/...s_red_hat/

This makes me hate the fact my workplace is shifting a lot of stuff to Red Hat in the very near future. Like, MASSIVE shift to RHEL products. I hate it.

[s3_gunzel]

CPanel very recently started supporting Debian (and unofficially some of its derivatives such as Ubuntu). It’s very likely that it’s not nearly as stable as the CentOS versions, but that’s probably going to change when people flock to Debian in the coming months.

Good - it was the one thing that shat me to tears when I ran a post 2 host service, and that was apt-geting out of habit.

[Darth-Apple]

One of the RHEL devs wrote a very lengthy post describing their thought processs. It’s fairly clear that our suspicions were confirmed. Honestly, they do have every right to do as they please. They are a for-profit company. But for those in the market that CentOS was in, they simply can’t get upset with people for looking elsewhere than their stream replacement. It caught people off guard and they pretty much brought that one on themselves.

And I get it. They need to make a profit. But I think they shot themselves in the foot on this one and probably did more harm than good to their bottom line. Less users of CentOS means much less community testing and support, putting more pressure onto RHEL to foot the bill. It literally seems counterproductive to nix it, even for their bottom line.

And they are a little upset that people expected the 10 year support to mean 10 year support. And yes, it’s basically a RHEL clone, but 1) it was community maintained and they bought it, and 2) Ubuntu is in this market with the same business model, so competition and a large, vibrant community shouldn’t really come as a surprise. It’s just the nature of the beast. It comes with the territory of being in open source.

https://crunchtools.com/before-you-get-m...ink-about/

[s3_gunzel]

Honestly, they do have every right to do as they please.

The issue is that they promised support until 2029 and then went "Nah, screw that, end of 2021, suck it." - that's the issue. They weren't immediately upfront. And this will cost them money because I'm seeing decision makers steer clear of RHEL too.

And they are a little upset that people expected the 10 year support to mean 10 year support. And yes, it’s basically a RHEL clone, but 1) it was community maintained and they bought it, and 2) Ubuntu is in this market with the same business model, so competition and a large, vibrant community shouldn’t really come as a surprise. It’s just the nature of the beast. It comes with the territory of being in open source.

Frankly, it's a bit of a wank to turn around and say "Yeah we'll support this for ten years" then arc up.

[Darth-Apple]

Yep. They're still salty about all the backlash. They can't just nix 10-year support for one of the world's most popular server OS's and expect people to be happy.

What gets me is that they are still trying to pass CentOS Stream as a bleeding edge RHEL, but it's quite literally a rolling-release, Debian-unstable type distro. It's simply not suitable for any sort of live environment, and they cannot possibly be unaware of that. Nobody using RHEL is EVER going to use a rolling release distribution on enterprise hardware.

So it's just a bit dishonest and I think people can see through that. Either way, RHEL will live on, and other CentOS-style distros are popping up quickly. We will wait to see what happens I suppose.

[Thomas]

Ars has a good writeup on alternatives https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/...ernatives/ Rocky looks promising

[Darth-Apple]

I like the way Rocky is shaping up as well. Especially given that it’s being developed by the original CentOS founder.

[Darth-Apple]

Red Hat did the right thing and replaced CentOS (for most users) via a new tier of RHEL. It’s now free for up to 16 production servers.

Let’s face it. The majority of people using CentOS either had fewer than 16 servers, or were in a larger business where RHEL could easily be afforded. This is a net gain for most former CentOS users, who can now access RHEL directly so long as they aren’t running large, 16+ server enterprise setups.

(That being said, CentOS was very popular for web hosts due to cPanel’s longstanding tradition of exclusive CentOS/RHEL support. These business will largely be forced to switch to a commercial RHEL license. However, these companies usually have the revenue to afford enterprise-grade, bulk licenses, and will not be cash-strapped by the change. Commercial-grade cloud hosting platforms would likely benefit from using RHEL due to stability and support anyhow. )

This is an unexpected and welcome change. It keeps RHEL relevant to the broader server community (enterprise and consumers alike) and helps to mitigate some of the blow from the discontinuation of CentOS. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/...ers/?amp=1

[s3_gunzel]

The majority of people using CentOS either had fewer than 16 servers, or were in a larger business where RHEL could easily be afforded.

You do realise with the advent of Virtualisation that this is still a non-starter for a lot of people - including me.

I have, at present, 11 production servers - they're all virtualised, but that's 11 installs of whatever OS (in my case, Ubuntu LTS). Convention is that you're supposed to have one server PER ROLE - so if that's Jenkins, or an issue tracker, or a database, whatever. One role.