Last month, Red Hat caused a great deal of uproar in the small business and Linux world when he announced the termination of CentOS Linux.
Old-fashionedness – and ambiguity in the published terms of Red Hat – led users to believe that CentOS 8 would be available by 2029, just like the RHEL 8 on which it is based. Red Hat’s early termination of CentOS 8 in 2021 removed eight of the ten years and left thousands of users stranded.
CentOS stream
Red Hat’s December announcement of CentOS Stream – initially described as a ‘replacement’ for CentOS Linux, has left many users confused about its role in the updated Red Hat ecosystem. This week, Red Hat explains the broad outlines as follows:
To sum up: we make CentOS Stream the collaboration hub for RHEL, with the landscape as follows:
- Fedora Linux is the place for important new innovations, thoughts and ideas about the operating system – this is essentially the next big version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is
born.- CentOS Stream is the platform that is constantly being delivered and becomes the next small version of RHEL.
- RHEL is the intelligent operating system for production workloads, used in almost every industry in the world, from cloud-scale implementation in mission-critical data centers and localized server rooms to public clouds and to remote edges of enterprise networks.
Although CentOS Stream for enthusiasts and home goats may be considered appropriate and perfectly adequate, the lack of a long, well-defined life cycle has made it inappropriate for most production use and especially production use by stores that have chosen an RHEL-compatible distribution. in the first place.
New free, cheap and simplified RHEL access
From 1 February 2021, Red Hat will make RHEL available free of charge for small-scale work productions – with ‘small’ defined as 16 systems or less. This access to RHEL without cost production is through the newly expanded Red Hat Developer Subscription program, and it comes without any strings attached – in Red Hat’s words: ‘it’s not a sales program, and no sales rep will succeed it. “
Red Hat is also expanding the availability of developer subscriptions to teams as well as individual users. If you move forward, RHEL customer subscriber can add the entire development teams to the developer subscription program for free. It enables the entire team to use Red Hat Cloud Access for simplified implementation and maintenance of RHEL on well-known cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Taking into account the previous public outrage over the early demise of CentOS 8, we have approached Red Hat for an explanation regarding availability guarantees – specifically whether any guarantee has been given that the terms of the free small production use will remain valid for the duration of the general support for the RHEL version they cover. After some deliberation, this was the official answer:
A Red Hat subscription gives you access to all available versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, except those with extensive support. This access ends when the subscription ends, as well as access to all related documentation, support, services, patches, and so on. It is therefore important to consider the subscription separately from the platform.
The Red Hat Developer program is not a program that is produced quickly by night or quickly; it has existed since the beginning of 2015 with the implementation of multiple systems from 2018. The big change today is that a small number of production systems can now be included under the subscription for individuals, but the program itself is appropriate and true. We have never removed anything from the program, but only added to it, which is emphasized by today’s announcement.
The individual developer subscription is currently set up as a one-year subscription. Renewals will be a simple process that clicks a button as close as possible. We do not intend to terminate this program and we have set it up to be sustainable – we want to continue to give users who want to use RHEL access to it. The main reason why we need an enrollment period is because it is legally difficult to offer unlimited conditions worldwide and as new laws come into force, for example GDPR, we need to be able to update the terms and conditions. This is similar to the way our customers buy Red Hat subscriptions for fixed terms, not forever.
Our goal is to keep small business use cases as an important part of the Red Hat Developer program and the individual developer subscription to help deliver more quality Linux businesses.