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.

[CRCinAU]

I used to use CentOS for *everything*. I was a package maintainer for well over 15 years. Then CentOS got killed, and now, I don't use RHEL or "CentOS" anywhere. I don't package things anymore, and I don't recommend any RHEL / "CentOS" products to anyone or any projects. The proof of RedHat killing their ecosystem will take years to show, but MBAs will get their bonuses in the short term, and that's all anyone cares about in the business world these days.

[joelanderson]

This caused a huge headache at my last job. We developed and deployed small self contained racks of equipment for RF testing and our software was deployed on CentOS. It was perfect for a small deployment and gave us flexibility to move to RHEL for customers who had enterprise software requirements. The early discontinuation of CentOS 8 also caused lots of extra headaches. Redhat really pulled a fast one by officially backing CentOS to push other options that used to be popular out before discontinuing it. Hopefully Alma and Rocky can help fill the void

[My-noname]

Interview format is a nice addition. You should do that more often. Lots of really interesting people in our communities.

[mx]

I haven't really been disrupted by these changes, CentOS 8 was still there while Rocky wasn't ready. Ater Rocky Linux 8 was ready, it was easy to migrate CentOS 8 to Rocky 8.

[Leha__]

It's a good lesson learned. Do not trust any corporation.

[mucholangs]

I was loyal to CENTOS forever. Rock solid.

I went through the pain of migrating to other RHEL flavors.
I bought two VPSes for testing...

Rocky Linux 8
EOL: 2029

AlmaLinux 9
EOL: active support until 31 May 2027, and security support until 31 May 2032.

I've been running both for about 2yrs now, and stable so far.

[paladingeorge]

I'm someone who has been indirectly burned by the death of CentOS...mostly because of a coworker who left me with a mess. He wouldn't put in the work to make sure we could replace CentOS and then bailed from the job, then I was forced to inherit his mess.

[philip]

The company that I worked for migrated all of the solutions running on CentOS servers to Ubuntu servers.
I don't know if this will work for RedHat like they wanted to, people will probably just go to Ubuntu, SUSE, Debian, etc. Most solutions support a range of Linux Distributions, just run a backup and then restore on the new server, most won't want to pay for RHEL.

[Sakurina]

Says a lot about the past few years that I immediately assumed Red Hat had done something else I hadn’t heard about when I saw this video pop up, but luckily that’s not the case

[ddEEE]

I moved to Alma as soon as it was released and have been a happy camper ever since.

[Crackalacking_Z]

This was really nice, I think more interviews would be nice content.

[adyss]

I work at a small company that until recently still used CentOS 6 on over 170 deployed servers. It took us 4 years to Have a migration script and to setup the same stack on Debian 11. Add one more year to migrate all of those machines. I am also one of the only linux "experts" at my company and have to teach my colleagues how to actually use debian. CentOS 6 was still SystemV based so they had to learn using systemd and so on. Since non of my colleagues use linux outside of work.. centos was all they knew

[patrickprucha]

Personally, since Red Hat notified that it was discontinuing CentOS, companies/individuals should have been planning the conversion to an alternative, however expensive, time consuming it is. But management should be fully aware so they can assign the resources to resolve the issue.

[finkelmana]

I work for one of the US's largest web hosting companies. You would not believe the number or people still running CentOS 6.10. EOL for CentOS 7 isnt looking any better. People will just continue to run it. We send out email notifications explaining why they should upgrade. The software they use on the servers tells them to upgrade. However, they just ignore it. These are not tech savvy people and either they dont know what risks and responsibilities they have or they choose to ignore it until something bad happens. The uninformed will always choose convenience over security.

[HurricaneRainbowOG]

stayed away from RHEL, CentOS. had a bad feeling that it wouldn't last. glad to have listened to the intuition

[Rain-King]

Wonderful interview. This channel honestly offers so much value to non-technical users like myself wanting to have a sense of the Linux and open-source landscape.

[kuhluhOG]

You know, if I would be a threat actor, I would start trying to find security problems in popular distros 1-2 years BEFORE it reaches EOL.
And when I find one, I would keep it a secret until it is EOL.
Why?
Because not all users will migrate and at that point I know that the systems which didn't WILL NOT be patched (or at least receives them).

So, yeah, I kinda expect attacks on the servers to rise quite a bit after the EOL date.

[davey]

I'm just an ordinary desktop user and have no experience with enterprise-level deployments, even as an end user, but I find topics like this very interesting. I recommend the Enterprise Linux Security podcast to anyone interested in the broader Linux world.

[rklrkl]

I'm surprised that AlmaLinux's ELevate tool wasn't mentioned - it allows you to warm upgrade between CentOS 7 and any of AlmaLinux 8, Rocky Linux 8, EuroLinux 8 or even CentOS Stream 8. I've used it successfully on several CentOS 7 servers, but there will obviously be downtime (including a couple of reboots) - you may be able to avoid disruption if you have a cluster and upgrade one node at a time. It was always annoying that RHEL has had warm upgrades via the Leapp tool for quite a long time, but CentOS never did until ELevate turned up (which also uses Leapp, but with a customised config).

[JasonTaylor-poxc]

When CentOS 8 EOL was announced, I know of several clients that decided to move to Ubuntu instead. It was a big move but worth it to them because they valued a stable Linux release.