The END of CENTOS matters more than you think!
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Timecodes:
00:00 Intro
00:52 CentOS
03:19 Why is CentOS still so popular?
05:20 How prevalent is CentOS right now
06:46 The problem with CentOS 7 going end of life
07:55 Stay on CentOS without patches
11:23 Move to another distro: a challenge
14:21 Extended Lifecycle support
18:57 Parting thoughts
19:37 Support the channel
#centos #centos #linux #linux
CentOS is short for Community Enterprise Operating System, and it started as one of the first Red hat Enterprise Linux clones: it was built from RHEL sources, and was 100% binary compatible.
The distro quickly became one of the most popular distros for servers, even overtaking the good old Debian in 2010, for a little while at least.
In 2014, Red Hat announced they would sponsor the CentOS project, probably seeing the advantage in fostering an ecosystem around their own enterprise offering, to convert organizations to RHEL when they needed more support, and to make sure developers had a solid platform to target.
That's when Red Hat gained ownership of all the trademarks, and they basically employed most major CentOS contributors.
Unfortunately, at the end of 2020, Red Hat announced that CentOS would be discontinued, at least in its current "RHEL clone" form, and would now be distributed as CentOS Stream, which isn't really the same kind of distribution: instead of being a rebuild of RHEL, which is what people mostly used CentOS for, it's basically RHEL's upstream, from which the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be built. Stream is also a rolling release, meaning that it's likely not suitable for a lot of people who relied on CentOS.
With that, CentOS 8 was quickly discontinued, in December 2021, leaving CentOS 7 as the only version that is still supported. And CentOS 7 will now be end of life at the end of June 2024, meaning that if you want a full rebuild of RHEL, and CentOS Stream doesn't work for you, you have to find another solution.
And this isn't really like any other enterprise distro going end of life: in most cases, for these, you have a direct upgrade path, like with Ubuntu LTS, or a new RHEL version. In CentOS's case, you don't: you either move to Stream, or you switch to another distro. Or well, there's another option, which we'll discuss in a minute.
CentOS 7 is still a very, very popular distribution on servers. First, a worrying statistic: out of all current CentOS users in early 2024, more than half use CentOS 6 or 8, meaning they're using end of life distros. CentOS 7 is 48.4% of current CentOS users.
Now, compared to other distributions, CentOS might not grab the lion's share for servers, but it's still a very prevalent operating system.
Now, the main reasons why organizations would stick to either unmaintained, end of life versions of CentOS, or to CentOS 7 as it is going end of life is very likely because there is no direct upgrade path: if you're on CentOS 8, you can't move to something else from CentOS. If you use CentOS 6, you could upgrade to 7, but migrating to a new distro that goes end of life in 2 months isn't necessarily worth it. And if you're on CentOS7, you can't upgrade to version 8, because it's also end of life.
Meaning that if your workflow or server depends on CentOS as a product, you're pretty much stuck, unless you want to move to another distributions that's also a RHEL clone, like AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux.
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