6 ms·

I manage a "tiny company", but we have 10-ish production CentOS 7/8 servers and this sounds interesting. Although my web-app use case is probably fine with Stre

by ehayes 6y ago

I manage a "tiny company", but we have 10-ish production CentOS 7/8 servers and this sounds interesting. Although my web-app use case is probably fine with Stream, I don't know why everyone is assuming Stream will be completely broken and useless.

ziml77 6y ago
It's not that the expectation is that it will be broken and useless. It's that the reason to choose CentOS was for the fact that it has slow release cycles which allow for long support periods.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> I don't know why everyone is assuming Stream will be completely broken and useless. It probably wont be completely broken and useless, but they replaced a stable OS with a beta, which is particularly galling to many users who picked that OS specifically because it was so stable.
- freedomben 6y ago
  Curious, do you consider Fedora to be an alpha? Did you consider RHEL to be a beta for CentOS previously? Just trying to see how you define "beta"
  - awill 6y ago
    I think you're digging in the wrong place, and focusing on the label. This shouldn't be kicking fedora down. It has a place, as does stream. The point is that with CentOS you expect a super stable release. Red Hat replaced that with what is clearly a less stable project. And as was said before, if you used CentOS, it's probably precisely because you want something super stable with long term support. Those are not the sorts of users who'll want to use Stream.
  - eropple 6y ago
    To me, Fedora is a desktop environment (my preferred one!) and absolutely an alpha/early-beta server option at best. CentOS Stream seems like "Fedora, again" and does not do what CentOS did. And now, the willingness to blow up CentOS with so little warning means there is a massive trust deficit here.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      There's a pretty big difference. While I'm very much not an expert on the RHEL QE process, my understanding is that Fedora is pretty much its own thing that is used to rebase RHEL on major revs. Whereas Stream is RHEL builds that have passed CI testing in the RHEL dev/test process.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > Curious, do you consider Fedora to be an alpha? Slightly detached because of their processing/release process (Fedora X never quite matched to RHEL Y even if there was some derivation), but yes, Fedora is absolutely the alpha for RHEL. It gets changes, including breaking changes, on a fast track (IIRC, Fedora frequently goes toe-to-toe with Arch for having the most recent packages), has a 13-month lifecycle with a strong expectation that you'll `dnf system-upgrade` regularly, and doesn't shy away from pushing on tech that they believe to be desirable even if it's not (yet) widely used (Wayland, BTRFS, CGroupsV2). > Did you consider RHEL to be a beta for CentOS previously? Now that's an interesting point that actually makes me stop and consider:) It is true that previously CentOS could legitimately claim to be even more stable/slow-moving than RHEL. I think the distinction that I would make is that RHEL had its own betas that were called betas, and that each point release was frozen/stable until the next one came along, while Stream is explicitly unfrozen all the time. So yes, I suppose a person could have described RHEL as CentOS's beta, although probably only jokingly because it still had Red Hat supporting it and feature freezes to control changes.
    - bluedays 6y ago
      Funny to read this because Fedora is definitely beta, because their distribution doesn't seem very stable. I switched away from Fedora because it seemed to break more than my Arch installation. There are a lot of things they are doing that no other distros are doing right now. Cgroups v2, for instance. The benefit of Fedora was that they handled a lot of things that were a pain to configure. The biggest culprit being fonts. But now that TrueType patents have expired, and it's included in Arch automatically it's one less reason to use Fedora.
bombcar 6y ago
Many people use CentOS to run "Enterprise" software that expects to be run on RHEL.
- alexhutcheson 6y ago
  Those are probably the users that RedHat is trying to nudge onto RHEL. "Enterprise" software is normally quite expensive, so the marginal cost of some RHEL Server licenses is probably a small fraction of the total cost of deploying the software in most cases. More generally, orgs that are running "Enterprise" software are already set up to pay for software. Going from spending $X to spending $X+Y is often not a big deal ("Ok, I'll run that through the same process I used to get approval for buying FooSoftWorks"), while going from $0 to $Y can be very hard ("I don't even know who I'd need to ask to get purchase approval for that").
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    > Going from spending $X to spending $X+Y is often not a big deal Except when $Y == $1000X. Then it really is a big deal. When you only have a tiny minority of RHEL hosts that you have full support contracts on, and an overwhelming majority of CentOS hosts that you administer in-house, it really isn't trivial. It's almost certainly cheaper to migrate to Oracle or Rocky. Migrations aren't cheap either.
  - JeremyNT 6y ago
    > More generally, orgs that are running "Enterprise" software are already set up to pay for software. Crucially, though, most entities who are running their own "enterprise" software deployments will need way more than 16 servers. Small shops do use "enterprise" software, of course, but they usually just pay somebody else to run it for them.
1337shadow 6y ago
Okay but I can't help but think about the social security in my country which I know runs likely to be more than hundreds of CentOS servers ... It's not like social security is a company making any profits, it's even the opposite, and now they are in such situation.
paul_f 6y ago
We are a smallish company with six CentOS 8 servers. Seems we fit into the profile of this new Developer program. To be honest, I can see us paying for full RHEL subscriptions before we would change distributions.
- chasil 6y ago
  Go ahead and buy licenses as a show of support, but I strongly suggest that you exercise the converter scripts in both directions, partially to know what will cause them to fail, and partially to have an option when the vendor misbehaves. Red Hat offers a "no support" server license for $350/year, which is the lowest licensing tier. Tiers with more capability and support are available for $800, and $1300. https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-server https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-ser... Oracle has a larger range of tiers. The "no support" license is $120/year. Tiers with more capability and support are available for $500, $1200, $1400, and $2300. https://www.oracle.com/linux/ https://www.oracle.com/linux/ Oracle Linux can be used in production without a paid license of any kind; Red Hat Linux cannot be used in this way for large deployments (excepting the new 16-seat license for a developer account). Red Hat is aggressive with software audits; I have seen one. Both Oracle and Red Hat now have complete toolsets to convert support between an installed CentOS/RedHat/Oracle OS. Red Hat can now convert an installed CentOS or Oracle Linux to RHEL; previously a wipe and reinstall was required ("have fun reinstalling your system" is still on Oracle's CentOS site). The description looks much more thorough in replacing all possible packages with Red Hat versions: https://access.redhat.com/articles/2360841 https://access.redhat.com/articles/2360841 Oracle does not replace CentOS or RedHat RPMs in their conversion (AFAIK), so it is much less violent on the platform changes. https://github.com/oracle/centos2ol https://github.com/oracle/centos2ol https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/reasons-for-switching-centos-to-oracle-linux https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/reasons-for-switching-centos-...
  - paul_f 6y ago
    "Red Hat can now convert an installed CentOS or Oracle Linux to RHEL" Apologies if a dumb question, but I assumed CentOS 8 was a clone of RHEL 8. What would change?

by ehayes 6y ago

ziml77 6y ago

It's not that the expectation is that it will be broken and useless. It's that the reason to choose CentOS was for the fact that it has slow release cycles which allow for long support periods.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

> I don't know why everyone is assuming Stream will be completely broken and useless. It probably wont be completely broken and useless, but they replaced a stable OS with a beta, which is particularly galling to many users who picked that OS specifically because it was so stable.

freedomben 6y ago
Curious, do you consider Fedora to be an alpha? Did you consider RHEL to be a beta for CentOS previously? Just trying to see how you define "beta"
- awill 6y ago
  I think you're digging in the wrong place, and focusing on the label. This shouldn't be kicking fedora down. It has a place, as does stream. The point is that with CentOS you expect a super stable release. Red Hat replaced that with what is clearly a less stable project. And as was said before, if you used CentOS, it's probably precisely because you want something super stable with long term support. Those are not the sorts of users who'll want to use Stream.
- eropple 6y ago
  To me, Fedora is a desktop environment (my preferred one!) and absolutely an alpha/early-beta server option at best. CentOS Stream seems like "Fedora, again" and does not do what CentOS did. And now, the willingness to blow up CentOS with so little warning means there is a massive trust deficit here.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    There's a pretty big difference. While I'm very much not an expert on the RHEL QE process, my understanding is that Fedora is pretty much its own thing that is used to rebase RHEL on major revs. Whereas Stream is RHEL builds that have passed CI testing in the RHEL dev/test process.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > Curious, do you consider Fedora to be an alpha? Slightly detached because of their processing/release process (Fedora X never quite matched to RHEL Y even if there was some derivation), but yes, Fedora is absolutely the alpha for RHEL. It gets changes, including breaking changes, on a fast track (IIRC, Fedora frequently goes toe-to-toe with Arch for having the most recent packages), has a 13-month lifecycle with a strong expectation that you'll `dnf system-upgrade` regularly, and doesn't shy away from pushing on tech that they believe to be desirable even if it's not (yet) widely used (Wayland, BTRFS, CGroupsV2). > Did you consider RHEL to be a beta for CentOS previously? Now that's an interesting point that actually makes me stop and consider:) It is true that previously CentOS could legitimately claim to be even more stable/slow-moving than RHEL. I think the distinction that I would make is that RHEL had its own betas that were called betas, and that each point release was frozen/stable until the next one came along, while Stream is explicitly unfrozen all the time. So yes, I suppose a person could have described RHEL as CentOS's beta, although probably only jokingly because it still had Red Hat supporting it and feature freezes to control changes.
  - bluedays 6y ago
    Funny to read this because Fedora is definitely beta, because their distribution doesn't seem very stable. I switched away from Fedora because it seemed to break more than my Arch installation. There are a lot of things they are doing that no other distros are doing right now. Cgroups v2, for instance. The benefit of Fedora was that they handled a lot of things that were a pain to configure. The biggest culprit being fonts. But now that TrueType patents have expired, and it's included in Arch automatically it's one less reason to use Fedora.

bombcar 6y ago

Many people use CentOS to run "Enterprise" software that expects to be run on RHEL.

alexhutcheson 6y ago
Those are probably the users that RedHat is trying to nudge onto RHEL. "Enterprise" software is normally quite expensive, so the marginal cost of some RHEL Server licenses is probably a small fraction of the total cost of deploying the software in most cases. More generally, orgs that are running "Enterprise" software are already set up to pay for software. Going from spending $X to spending $X+Y is often not a big deal ("Ok, I'll run that through the same process I used to get approval for buying FooSoftWorks"), while going from $0 to $Y can be very hard ("I don't even know who I'd need to ask to get purchase approval for that").
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  > Going from spending $X to spending $X+Y is often not a big deal Except when $Y == $1000X. Then it really is a big deal. When you only have a tiny minority of RHEL hosts that you have full support contracts on, and an overwhelming majority of CentOS hosts that you administer in-house, it really isn't trivial. It's almost certainly cheaper to migrate to Oracle or Rocky. Migrations aren't cheap either.
- JeremyNT 6y ago
  > More generally, orgs that are running "Enterprise" software are already set up to pay for software. Crucially, though, most entities who are running their own "enterprise" software deployments will need way more than 16 servers. Small shops do use "enterprise" software, of course, but they usually just pay somebody else to run it for them.

1337shadow 6y ago

Okay but I can't help but think about the social security in my country which I know runs likely to be more than hundreds of CentOS servers ... It's not like social security is a company making any profits, it's even the opposite, and now they are in such situation.

paul_f 6y ago

We are a smallish company with six CentOS 8 servers. Seems we fit into the profile of this new Developer program. To be honest, I can see us paying for full RHEL subscriptions before we would change distributions.

chasil 6y ago
Go ahead and buy licenses as a show of support, but I strongly suggest that you exercise the converter scripts in both directions, partially to know what will cause them to fail, and partially to have an option when the vendor misbehaves. Red Hat offers a "no support" server license for $350/year, which is the lowest licensing tier. Tiers with more capability and support are available for $800, and $1300. https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-server https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-ser... Oracle has a larger range of tiers. The "no support" license is $120/year. Tiers with more capability and support are available for $500, $1200, $1400, and $2300. https://www.oracle.com/linux/ https://www.oracle.com/linux/ Oracle Linux can be used in production without a paid license of any kind; Red Hat Linux cannot be used in this way for large deployments (excepting the new 16-seat license for a developer account). Red Hat is aggressive with software audits; I have seen one. Both Oracle and Red Hat now have complete toolsets to convert support between an installed CentOS/RedHat/Oracle OS. Red Hat can now convert an installed CentOS or Oracle Linux to RHEL; previously a wipe and reinstall was required ("have fun reinstalling your system" is still on Oracle's CentOS site). The description looks much more thorough in replacing all possible packages with Red Hat versions: https://access.redhat.com/articles/2360841 https://access.redhat.com/articles/2360841 Oracle does not replace CentOS or RedHat RPMs in their conversion (AFAIK), so it is much less violent on the platform changes. https://github.com/oracle/centos2ol https://github.com/oracle/centos2ol https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/reasons-for-switching-centos-to-oracle-linux https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/reasons-for-switching-centos-...
- paul_f 6y ago
  "Red Hat can now convert an installed CentOS or Oracle Linux to RHEL" Apologies if a dumb question, but I assumed CentOS 8 was a clone of RHEL 8. What would change?