I run and rely on Centos for 10 plus years. Painful to accept what you've just said but it's true. I needed to adjust my mindset. There might be a huge shift to Ubuntu in the future.
If you're used to rpm-based distributions and still want to have the option to 'bridge' the community with the enterprise version of a platform, I would suggest you give OpenSUSE a try.
That really has to suck. Many people that are ok with this thing doesn't seem to realize that there's a lot work many have done and been expecting long term support. Now about eight years melted. It's huge thing especially for many small it-companies that have done their solutions on top of CentOS.
BTW have you considered Oracle? They seem to enjoy this change. Might be option for quite many? blogs.oracle.com/linux/need-a-stable,-rhel-compatible-alternative-to-centos-three-reasons-to-consider-oracle-linux
Thank you Jay, it's always nice to hear your level headed opinion. I used centos for years at home and also to partially prepare for my RHCSA 5 cert back in the days. However lately I found centos so out of date and so difficult to get current versions of things installed on (dependency hell) that I've moved to debian. Getting kubernetes and docker going on centos was a mission, for example. At work we are using some centos so there will be meetings coming up for sure!
I am very glad I found your channel some time ago its very pleasant and important for me and probably for all your subscribers to hear what you saying, showing and shaing your knowledge with us, thank you for your GREAT JOB! I will stay with Your channel for long time as it's great source of knowledge and news what's going on in IT industry. Stay safe and see you very soon! THANK YOU!
Earlier this month, I built a CentOs v8 box to replace a CentOs v6 box that serves as our corporate perimeter firewall. Your video makes good points on not being married to one distribution. I'd argue that moving from one distro to another isn't always a quick and easy process.
I use Leap 15.2 and I love it. My desktop is Fedora and my Development software is on ubuntu. SUSE has some great products. I would match the Open Leap 15.2 to Centos 7.x RHEL management sold out to IBM. Re Centos. At some of our User group meetings, some sys admins admit to managing server parks containing 25+ centos installations. It is situations like that, that bites the hand that feeds you. Of course, the company with 25 centos installations say "Why buy the cow wnen you get the milk for free. If I was RHEL, I would make a serial numbered Centos 8 copy available at $25/copy. For the 250 server site, that is less than 2 days salary for an admin.
Moral of the story: When you base your company on a free ride being hosted by a commercial company, you're setting yourself for having the rug yanked out on you at any time. If your only use of Red Hat was of CentOS....you weren't a customer.
Cononical is a private company as far as I know so it has to be sold, another company can’t buy it out. Ansible is just a tool and can be fairly easily replaced with one of the plethora of alternatives
1. Ansible is open source, so what's the problem? 2. Canonical being acquired makes no difference to any of his points. He says throughout the video that he's ready to leave them at a moment's notice if he needs to.
@@adamyork2333 1. The problem is that people create huge dependencies into Ansible, and if RedHat decides to alter the product direction/future you will be in trouble. Sure, just fork it, but you will still need to do something about your close relationship with Ansible. 2. I agree completely with his main point which is to change the way we think. Earlier in the video, however, he talks about how unlikely Canonical are to do this and that. By saying that he trusts Canonical he goes a little bit against his own advice. What happens is Microsoft buys Canonical tomorrow?
@@geogmz8277 not really. If you actually test before production Arch is pretty good on servers, particularly if you use it as a very light and up to date docker host os. Other advantages include: not having to go through major version upgrades, not worrying about political decisions from parent companies.
@_xenharmony If the problem is that we can't rely on anyone else, then what options are there ? I use Ubuntu, but what if Canonical go the same route as IBM RedHat ?
This was news to me today. Earlier this year I’ve made the decision to migrate our core application over to Kubernetes. Initially (more just for our particular use case), I just wanted to move away from certain kinds of server maintenance (particularly due to needing to scale). We were actually pretty tightly bound to CentOS in a few ways. But I’m pretty glad we’re going to k8s, not just to move away from some server admin stuff, but reinforced by this unexpected lifecycle change with CentOS. I’m not surprised either, and I like CentOS, but at least glad we’re not going to rely on CentOS 8 anymore.
Good video. We should also start thinking about why it is companies get to make decisions like this without any consent to the consumers and workers who use and maintain their products. Its about time working people, especially those in the tech sector start organizing across companies and build solidarity to push back against these companies. Having a plan B is great, being a wise consumer is great, but we need to start creating an institution to demand what we want or else we stop running the gears on the whole god damn thing. If we don't do this eventually we will lose the cat and mouse game of running from one distro/software to the next as Amazon,Microsoft and IBM become more efficient at consolidating these tools.
I don't think we have any right to expect a say in decisions regarding something we're getting for free. My problem with this news isn't that it's being done, but that they drastically changed the rules after releasing version 8. Going from 10 years of support to being told you have about a year to move or accept a change that will affect the stability of your servers is the problem here. They should have kept their promise on 8 and just announced that as of version 9, it would change to a rolling release.
I totally agree with you, I personally have 70% of my servers in ubuntu and the other 30 on CentOS, my personal laptop is Manjaro, I believe getting stuck in one distro is a big mistake, also the big fun part of linux is the ability to try and learn something new all the time. But for those who are stuck on CentOS, Mr. Kurtzer already announced he will go ahead with Rocky Linux and just fork CentOS
Thanks for the quality of content you provide to us. I really appreciate someone like you talking in a very professional way about Linux. It is something we always miss in the community! Thanks!
So, true, cross platform.tools is the heart of the tool chain that just makes things reasonably fair for everyone working on infrastructures changes. As a linux admin, I live with "change" and its that idea that allows us to innovate at areas we never dreamed possible. A wonderful eye and mind opening video in my opinion.
Can't believe it. I have relied on CentOS 7 for years. seeing this go down is unbelievable. I was really expecting CentOS 8 to be around for a while but I guess not. Moving forward, I guess I just need to write Ansible playbooks that support multiple distros like you ;). Thanks for the video.
They were gonna do this, no question about it. I agree that suddenly cutting 8 support to 2021 is wild, this was announced near the EOL of 6 so a lot of people just switched to 8 and now are in a pickle. I think as a compromise I would have choosen to shift the support date to match 7.
Thanks, so much, Jay, for your candid remarks. I'm hoping this doesn't occur in Ubuntu since I pre-ordered your 3rd edition "Mastering Ubuntu Server" and look forward to getting into it. I've used Ubuntu for many years and for a time it was my #1 daily desktop driver OS. This is disturbing news for me as I live about 4 hours down the road from the headquarters of Red Hat in Raleigh, NC and feel that for a company that I looked up to when I was teaching CentOS LInux on college campuses could betray those businesses that were all-in with CentOS 8 who will now have to use CentOS Stream or something else altogether is a downright shame. After watching your video, I'm now convinced that you've just made an excellent case for Qubes OS, which is based on both Fedora 30 and Debian 10. I'm putting Qubes OS 4.0.3 through its paces and at a point where I can almost say this is my daily driver OS for the future.
As someone who was a centos fanboy in school, this is sad news for me. Ill address one thing you mentioned, you said you dont know why people hate on Ubuntu... setting up a static IP address frustrated the hell out of me and other students when setting up Ubuntu servers lol. Much easier on centos, so that’s why we navigated towards it more than Ubuntu. Also, thanks for the advice of having more than one solution setup. I just got hired as an solutions analyst for the cloud team to a big company and will use this mindset for all my projects. Love all your videos man, much respect.
I didn't mind Ubuntu at all. I fact during school I preferred it over CentOS. It just felt more comfortable to use. There's not really one thing that stand out to me, but I hear where you're coming from.
In a comment thread a Gentleman named Jose said "If you're used to rpm-based distributions and still want to have the option to 'bridge' the community with the enterprise version of a platform, I would suggest you give OpenSUSE a try." I agree, Open SuSE is stable and easy to administer.
Brilliant video. I didn't know this happened as I have not used CentOS for a few years. But what I can say from experience is that it is brilliant advice. Companies from Apple, NVIDIA to now sadly Linux distributions treat users more as dependents and ultimately it is us who pay the price for that. There almost never is something for nothing on a large scale - but laughably, this happens *especially* when you pay for products. As you imply, one can only respond by creating flexible use cases. So this is so refreshing to hear. In my case, I ran Ubuntu until Canonical drivers and updates on 20.04 continued to destroy my GPU server and laptops repeatedly and I just moved to Debian which is ... well its great. I had built everything on a container model so the container OS could be dumped in 30 mins. It does depend on use case but what you say is very important for everyone to know - that we still have choice. Thank you very much for posting this and I am so sorry to hear about CentOS - I had considered returning to it a few weeks back : glad now that I did not!
I moved from Slack, to Red Hat, to PCLinuxOS, to Linux Mint. But have kept something on Manjaro, Debian, LMDE, and tinkering with a couple others. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Nothing is perfect. Maybe I should start back on Solaris, or FreeBSD, both of which I've used a bit, too. This video is spot-on. I've been in IT and the IT-related field since about 1988. I've seen too many changes to count. It's the constant, not stability. Younger IT folks just figure things are a snapshot, not a river of roiled water.
I couldn't agree with you more! The same applies with hardware vendors too. Years ago, I worked in a data center where the Sr. Execs were all so proud that they standardized on Compaq servers. In my mind, I just thought, "you just lost all negotiating leverage when the Compaq sales guy visits your DC." I told them they should standardize on at least 2 vendors, and when the vendor sales people visit, take them on a tour of the DC by walking them past their competitors' products. LOL I walked away when I got the "deer in headlights" reaction from the decision makers. That said, I'm waiting to see how IBM reacts to the uproar. Then, I'll decide what to do with my centos7 installations when that time comes.
same with me...first touched red hat back in the late '90s and didn't know what i was doing; then was managing a bunch of RHEL systems in 2007 and learned linux that way
A friend of mine is an engineer at nasa and learning centOS is a mandatory part of his training. This is messed up and they should definitely be boycotted. Guess one man distros don't sound too bad after all now. Btw, the original creator of centOS Gregory Kurtzer has already started on a fork of it called Rocky Linux.
Well if a company decides to go with another FreeOS like Rocky, then the people in the IT department are just as STUPID for going along with this decision! Do your self a favor and use this experience as a chance to DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME! Buy a supported version of an OS, and save future costs by not having to spend a huge amount of money on labor and development costs AGAIN to completely rebuild the IT infrastructure from the bottom up! Oh yeah....No wonder SpaceX is beating the S#!t out of Nasa! I bet SpaceX uses a licensed version of OS's on their servers! As we all know, the United States government is cheap as hell also. I wonder how many installations of CentOS they have? Now we the tax payers are going to have to pay through our A$$es for those upgrades, IF they take place! Hell, the US government is probably still of CentOS 5. LMAO!!!
Excellent points. With your proxmox based environment and ansible, moving to a different platform in your case would be trivial: backup data, rebuild new os environment, restore. Probably easier, than upgrading from windows 7 to 10.
This was very disappointing news to read and hear about today. My company uses RHEL and CentOS on most of our production servers mainly because of the long support cycle. I'm the admin of those systems, so this news affects me directly. Fortunately, we're still on v.7 so we'll still have support. That being said, the software that we run on those servers is cross-platform, so we can pivot to an Ubuntu or Debian-based platform without much fuss. When it comes time to upgrade these servers (hardware and virtual), I can switch to a new OS and my company will be none the wiser. This isn't something that my company's leadership will be worried about unless we have an outage at the data center. I feel really bad for all those admins who have already migrated to CentOS 8 and will need to have those conversations with leadership. This is really screwed up.
Maybe Oracle could be future option for some? I'd personally consider this. blogs.oracle.com/linux/need-a-stable,-rhel-compatible-alternative-to-centos-three-reasons-to-consider-oracle-linux
You're more positive than a lot of people. Not sure if that's good or bad. But you've made a lot of good points and I agree. But that really sucked for Redhat to do this to all the people that just got Centos 8 installed and configured for their organization.
Great points, thank you. People do not think that vendor lock-in is possible when using open-source software, but this crisis shows that it is. Having a Vendor Plan B is as essential as having backups.
Although I am using RHEL at work (in the company where I am employed abt. 99% of all Linux hosts run on RHEL), and although I am a bit disappointed to hear that Red Hat are going to ditch CentOS, their decision doesn't really affect me on my private usage of Linux. Albeit I run Fedora 33 on my laptop, and have another one for fiddling and expetimenting with other distros, that currently has Arch installed, my private requirements are so modest that the SW stuff can run on virtually any distro. I even haven't any Windows host nor VM, because there is only one SW with only Windows binaries that I use, which after minimal fiddling runs flawlessly within the WINE syscall wrapper. So my private preference for Fedora is soly owed to my laziness, because from work, where we use, as written, RHEL I know how most stuff is configured in the Red Hat realm, i.e. I know the whereabouts of config files, and I do nearly all adaptations in the shell and in vim. But should one future Fedora release annoy me sufficiently I would have no insurmountable issues with shifting to some other, non-RH related distro.
Good points Jay, but seeing that most people that work on development,can't always depend on donations to pay the bills, so we can safely say that no public company can always be sell proof. I have been fhinking about this, but all ican think of is to concetrate our donations to a fewer "brands" but even so that would always reduce user choices. and still guarantee nothing. Your suggestions are valid of course. Good start, but when you see furter undr currents developing, please keep sharing, your insights are always valuable.. Regards, Nick C.
You mean the ~60-80% working for Red Hat? The community may shift a bit, but RockyLinux is still an empty repository. Building a distribution is hard and needs a lot of expertise. So, it will take time, until Rocky is ready for something. Maybe CloudLinuxOS is faster. But CentOS developers switching from Red Hat to HCPng will not happen in some measurable degree.
@@daniels1924 Exactly. Does anyone else member when this was a thing? linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/130249/CentOS-Project-Administrator-Goes-AWOL The maintainer was hired by Red Hat after this. I vividly remember installing Scientific Linux during the AWOL. Also for those new to the group, E of CentOS was for the word Enterprise. If I want rolling, I'm sure Arch can provide. IBM, is there anything you cannot ruin anymore? "Halt and Catch Fire" is a pretty half decent Netflix binge for anyone raging at IBM right now.
I started with Mandrake Linux, and have been with it ever since. It was designed from the ground up for ordinary users like you and me. When the Mandrake company tried to be a pay-for distro and went broke in the process, its team continued Mandriva as Mageia. OpenMandriva is now a Russian distro, and like many users, I have never got it even to start, but Mageia has stayed with Gael Duval's original concept. IMO, it is the only distro that has everything, but is still user-friendly. Every other distro I have tried (including CentOS) has been missing something.
Many people I've talked with aren't as upset with the direction of CentOS as they are with version 8 being released with the promise of 10 years of support and then a year into it, after expensive planning, testing, and migrations have occurred, pulling the rug out from under them and being told they have about a year to figure out what to do. If IBM Red Hat had said, "As of version 9, CentOS will become a rolling release," then people would have had ample time to figure out which direction they wanted to go. The way it was done is the major problem.
Exactly. We waited for CentOS 8 to start major updates, then they announced this. Does RH really think that will push us to purchase RedHat subscriptions? Not after you just showed us your true colors. We'll be shifting our servers to one of the new EL distros (Rocky, Alma, etc).
Another handy tip is if you use a Linux distro store your root directory and home directory separately so its easy for you to switch distros if you ever have to.
That sounds really great then you need to hire people who can do all of that and even think like that and work together on that. Have a IT management team that makes sure that different departments coordinate to keep building on something like that. My company structure and organization is quite madness. Admirable what you say, I would be amazed if your ansible or configuration management is capable of dynamically recreating the same system or workoing functionality on multiple OSes. We work with puppet and use ansible for some orchestration tasks. Interesting what you say in this concept, but really abstract and I guess a lot of work and hard to maintain.
@_xenharmony I know how to use system properly. But I don't have such problems on CentOS, Ubuntu, Mint and even Windows. As I said with each version Debian is getting worse and worse. More stupid bugs after clean installation. You answer doesn't resolve them at all. Do you mean create a project with automation tools such an ansible and fix your "stable LTS system" after clean installation? I don't know your background and you don't know my background. Where and how do you use Debian?
Most tools I use on CentOS can be move/compile on Ubuntu. The people who don't have $ are the ones using these free OS. When a company does this, people just shift to a different free OS. I remember when MonoWall was abandon, people just moved to pfSense and no one cried about it.
The unforgivable part is as you mentioned, they are going back on the CentOS 8 support commitment. They should have released the plans - CentOS Stream is the future, but we are giving our full commitment of support to CentOS 8, there will just not be a CentOS 9.
I feel the same.. I’ll wipe every computer and shift to something else. Good call on OS specific tools… If you’ve been around long enough you know it’s your data that’s valuable,not so much the OS.
The possibilities ...I.B.M around January 12 could announce, "Feed back from commercial and desktop hobby users of Cent OS 8 has been overwhelming. Cent OS is not only loved but also needed. We have decided to not only reverse our decision to end of life Cent Os but to extend suport of all Cent Os products untill 2026. At that time we will make a determination of its future. Happy New Year.
Agree wholeheartedly Jay. I thought Fedora was a Redhat spin too. I really wonder about Windows and the 90% of organisations that are welded in with Windows - expertise, users habits...I'm thinking of the Education department here in Australia...totally welded to Windows and shoving it down the throats of students, teachers - everyone.
What does this event mean to this video series on learning CENTOS? I’ve been following passionately and have learned a lot. I think it’s still useful for people learning about Linux but I wonder if there are going to be more installments
This was a fantastic video however I've worked in information technology a long time. A large portion of these companies are going to submit Redhat a purchase order and pay for the software. Some will continue to pay others may only purchase a year of support giving them more time to migrate off of the platform. You just can't turn on a dime when dealing with large scale deployments.
This is find if you do not have any external requirements. There are many vendor applications that only support RHEL and downstreams. While maintaining architecture independant configs and deployments, along with tools is an excellent goal, you can't always do that. For now, there is no immediate rush to move from CentOS. If you are on CentOS 7, you can stay there for another 5 years. If you have moved to CentOS 8, you have another year of full support. You can EASILY move your deployed servers from CentOS to another downstream OS, such as Oracle Linux. Soon, the founders of CentOS will be spinning up Ricky Linux to take it's place, so long-term support for EL8 won't be an issue.
Very good advice. Thank you for saying. I use Linux Mint for a couple years now and would really appreciate if you would make (or provide links to others who have made) several different techniques to maintain a distro independent backups.
I just stumbled upon your channel and this video. Content aside, I just wanted to say I *love* that server rack behind you and am very interested in details on it and its contents. I'll check your videos to see if you address that or not. Have a great week and a great holiday season!
I made Oracle Linux my standard distribution at my company years ago. I am now married with that distribution. This video post gives me something to think about.
Cloud Linux will be forking Centos 8 / Rhel 8 to create an open-source. The company announced yesterday. This can be a viable solution for Centos users. Again, I agree with using cross-platform applications to ensure it can easily migrate to a different Linux distribution.
We are currently still using CentOS 6, moving to CentOS 7. Other than security, there isn't a big case for us to keep up-to-date with the latest version. So we aren't in a panic mode, although we have talked about it. Have plenty of time to do the migration
It is very sad IBM is killing CentOS ... They could not compete in the LINUX space... just like they fell asleep at the wheel when they lost the Desktop market and abandoned their O/S 2 in 2000 and gave up on the PC and laptop markets around 2000... and in 2019 bought Red Hat Linux to gain market domination in the server market and get back what they lost to Microsoft and Apple and could not otherwise gain back... Companies will always do what is good for their share holders and what is bad for innovation and open source.
This is a really great message. You’re right, mindset is very important if you’re going to be successful in navigating the IT world. You spoke of cross tools, such as, Ansible. What are some other tools that you use to protect yourself from shifts like this?
Feels like a good post / video on your thoughts on structuring ansible roles to support multiple platforms would be useful. The default ansible role documentation, is a bit open here, but for experienced admins it feel like there are some conventions that would be useful to address.
I'd love if you'd make that video on how to change distros. I think many other noobs like me, who are doing a lot of hopping in search of their favourite distro, would love it too.
An alternative to Cento OS would be Oracle Enterprise Linux. Oracle Linux is 100% application binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Oracle Linux is easy to download and completely free to use. Free source code, free binaries, free updates, freely redistributable, free for production use. Been using it for years.
Moving Centos to upstream totally makes sense to me. People can use Centos and buy Red Hat stuff, products , support etc etc IF or WHEN needed and Fedora is never far away neither... I think they are on the "right track".... Kubernetes recently dropped Docker because various reasons... meanwhile Centos had already adopted Podman as Docker replacement in their Redhat product line (Openshift) etc. Compared to other "Linux companies"... they have no competitors (except for their poor ARM support which sucks maybe). Also it seems to me Red Hat still have many of most active Linux Kernel contributors as employees, for this reason alone I doubt anyone will walk too far away from them.
Good logic, well stated, appreciate your opinion. I don't get how people don't just move on. Hey, use your noodle, just look at the distrowatch charts... leaders change all the time. Companies come and go. Knowledge is power. Adaptability and open community are at the heart of Linux.
It's not the end of time. IBM invested in Linux, decades ago. Redhat became a great company in the Linux field and IBM acquired Redhat. In a way that's not a big surprise at all. CentOS in its enterprise like setup long time ago made me switch to Debian and Debian based distributions. They require less hardware in order to run. Arch Linux is also a great option. Sooner or later people would be happy with the end CentOS :) So many better solutions are possible
At 5:35 - it does matter if you've paid for it or not. If one party is not giving anything in exchange, it's a low quality (business) relationship. A different takeaway here is that financially supporting our favorite software would actually be a wise long term strategy for the open source community.
Well, only if you don't find drama in systemd. I do have my fair share of beefs with it but it does have major advantages over the old and terrible sysVinit.
@@mzs114 they are not. please, stops trying to twist it. it doesn't change anything. centos was just leaf of rhel, not community-based actually, so it's got up here where it is
@@MichaelDavydoff Lol, you are not presenting any credible reference to support your "claims", and instead deflecting, btw, the C in CentOS itself stands for "Community" in it. :D Setting aside CentOS, still waiting for how BSDs are not community based?
@@mzs114 Well, the term "community-based" itself is vague, I think. Depending on how you define the term, even Ubuntu can be "community-based". He probably (just guessing here) meant that since BSD started off as something owned by a company (Bell Labs, which was owned by ATnT at the time) it's not a community-based project. Again, this largely depend on how you define the term "community-based".
With Rocky Linux and CloudLinux both stepping up, I think things will end up being okay. And I love my Ubuntu and Linux Mint, but I can use Debian as well.
CloudLinux isn't free either last time I checked, might as well just pay IBM if cost was the only reason you used CentOS vs RHEL. Hadn't heard of Rocky Linux until now, but then I've never been a huge fan of RPM-based distros in general. I'll check it out regardless.
@@javabeanz8549 ahh, interesting announcements. Shame that Scientific Linux just withered and died years back, but it does appear that there will once again be two healthy, free re-distributions of RHEL. Competition and alternatives are good. And who knows, SL might make a comeback.
You have some very good points especially the one about the change in mindset. Redhat were always a sellout and people don’t understand this. I stopped using redhat almost 20 years ago. People need to understand that opensource does not mean free and choose their distros carefully. I switched to Debian years ago thinking I might just go all the way back to freebsd where i come from. Ubuntu really put linux on the desktop. My 2 cents.
Well stated and thoughtfull. I'm not suprised...IBM ... BIgBlue is kinda like this-always have been. I;'d love to see the Mint Team come out with a "CentoOS Spin".
I am just stepping into Linux world, marching onward to LPIC-1 certification, gaining some practical experience. I am very happy to find your channel, many thanks for what you're doing. I've been doing my training with CentOS-based environment both in my lab and production. I feel like it's time to switch to Debian/Ubuntu.
This entire thing feels like a thinly-veiled criticism of Capitalism and in lovin’ it. Either way, great vid! I was about a week from moving everything to CentOS 8 when this happened, we’re probably moving to Debian now. What an ordeal....
Sigh. I was skirting the Ansible solution for a bunch of Ubuntu servers, but this argument makes a ton of sense. Guess I'll have to buckle down and learn to use it. Thanks for the other links.
Companies exist to make profit. Free Linux distros that compete with paid Linux distros owned by the same company are endangered. A similar event was seen with Oracle's acquisition of Java, and MYSQL. I really liked CENTOS. I also liked SUSE, and UBUNTU. All we can do is wait and see. Just be flexible, and prepared to shift.
One question (and do apologize my naivety in the Linux and Orchestration history): How does Opswork being tied to AWS any different from Ansible? What if Red Hat decides to charge or change their model structure for Ansible? I could be wrong but it is a question I am trying to get a grasp. At the end, you will be tied into something.. It seems like it is a matter of who and how much options are provided (if any).
In terms of never relying on a single platform. If it really *is* that important to you. If you really need it, what you need is a contract. What you're describing is doing a bunch of extra work across multiple platforms when, for an enterprise, what you probably want is a contractual agreement with a legal entity.
I think rolling back Centos 8 support to end of 2021 is a really bad decision. AFAIK it was originally scheduled to last till 2029. Scaling it back to 2025 when support for Centos 7 ends would be a bit more reasonable. Also, they have said there will be options on Red Hat, but they should have had that ready when this was announced. I have a personal server I was about to migrate to Centos 8, so I'm grateful I hadn't gone ahead with it yet. Rocky Linux looks interesting, though.
Wow... I've not seen slackware since.. maybe 1998. What does slack give you that gentoo doesn't? I mean isn't slack basically here, install this initial binary distro to get started, then you're on your own to download and compile the latest upstream sources. At least gentoo has configs already in place that more or less keep up automatically downloading and building the latest tested upstream sources right?
@@phillipsusi1791 there's a thriving community of packagers (eg. Ponce/sbo) that means there's very little that needs to be self-compiled. I won't say it's as seamless as the repo stores of Ubuntu or centos but it's pretty good. Yes there's no dependency checking but we're fine with that. Precise control of your system is what slackware is about.
The harsh reality is that proprietary OSs are more likely to around for longer since they are financially sustainable and highly profitable. Most shiny distros will throw users under the bus when Silicon Valley comes knocking. Another harsh reality is that cross-platform software is usually less stable than platform-specific software.
Grandpa always said never put all your eggs in one basket... Hannibal on the A Team always has a plan B, Always! Love Tv Quotes! LOL You are right, I have a Ubuntu Server and I am setting up a Debian one just because. That is why I have Mint, Arch, MX, Debian systems as drivers. Plan B! I feel sorry for all the IT's for sure... Did some of that years ago... Thanks for the video! LLAP
I used to use redhat based distros but tired of these ending projects, I changed to use only Debian.
I'm not really sure on debians future either. Lighted Ive just been reading the mailing list.
Same here. Just use Debian only now.
From rpm based distros openSUSE is quite good choice.
I have a lot of time using CentOs, but Fedora Server is a good alternative also...
@@imeraj.g You're using Fedora on production? You're brave.
I run and rely on Centos for 10 plus years. Painful to accept what you've just said but it's true. I needed to adjust my mindset. There might be a huge shift to Ubuntu in the future.
Canonical throws their users under the advertising bus every chance they get, I'd rather run Open SuSE
If you're used to rpm-based distributions and still want to have the option to 'bridge' the community with the enterprise version of a platform, I would suggest you give OpenSUSE a try.
I think with the whole snaps deal ubuntu will be perfect for servers. For desktop usage I would rather learn gentoo instead of using ubuntu.
Wouldn't it be easier to migrate into openSUSE?
@@gaurangshukla8235 canonical is just bad and snaps are worse. I prefer Debian stable for production
With your logic, you shouldn't rely on ansible either. The thing is, you always need to rely on something.
This is EXACTLY what I've been preaching for a couple of decades. Never use a platform-specific solution unless you really really have to.
Haha
Yeah, like all those people and companies that are All In on Windows because they Have to Be!
Yes. A good admin is a paranoid one. A better admin is both paranoid _and_ prepared.
Will Ubuntu be ok on future? I kinda paranoid of that
@@KangJangkrik There's always Debian and other derivatives thereof.
@@KangJangkrik Debian might be safer bet
or openSuse
Just moved around 480 servers to Centos 8, 20 left still on Centos 7.
Sweating bullets right now. 😰
Wow that sucks! 😅 Been there done that.. It's the first time I'm not on that position.
That really has to suck. Many people that are ok with this thing doesn't seem to realize that there's a lot work many have done and been expecting long term support. Now about eight years melted. It's huge thing especially for many small it-companies that have done their solutions on top of CentOS.
BTW have you considered Oracle? They seem to enjoy this change. Might be option for quite many? blogs.oracle.com/linux/need-a-stable,-rhel-compatible-alternative-to-centos-three-reasons-to-consider-oracle-linux
@_xenharmony Based on what?
LOL sorry you should have bought support from RedHat and been done with it. 480 servers is NOT a small amount. Pay up.
Thanks for the passionate but sound advice. Two things: Always have a plan B and never use platform specific tools.
Thank you Jay, it's always nice to hear your level headed opinion. I used centos for years at home and also to partially prepare for my RHCSA 5 cert back in the days. However lately I found centos so out of date and so difficult to get current versions of things installed on (dependency hell) that I've moved to debian. Getting kubernetes and docker going on centos was a mission, for example. At work we are using some centos so there will be meetings coming up for sure!
I am very glad I found your channel some time ago its very pleasant and important for me and probably for all your subscribers to hear what you saying, showing and shaing your knowledge with us, thank you for your GREAT JOB! I will stay with Your channel for long time as it's great source of knowledge and news what's going on in IT industry. Stay safe and see you very soon! THANK YOU!
Earlier this month, I built a CentOs v8 box to replace a CentOs v6 box that serves as our corporate perimeter firewall. Your video makes good points on not being married to one distribution. I'd argue that moving from one distro to another isn't always a quick and easy process.
Thanks Jay. Rocky linux default login is Yo! Adrian
OpenSuse there bumping along. Sits side by side with Suse Enterprise for 15 years.
I use Leap 15.2 and I love it. My desktop is Fedora and my Development software is on ubuntu.
SUSE has some great products. I would match the Open Leap 15.2 to Centos 7.x RHEL management sold out to IBM.
Re Centos.
At some of our User group meetings, some sys admins admit to managing server parks containing 25+ centos installations. It is situations like that, that bites the hand that feeds you. Of course, the company with 25 centos installations say "Why buy the cow wnen you get the milk for free.
If I was RHEL, I would make a serial numbered Centos 8 copy available at $25/copy. For the 250 server site, that is less than 2 days salary for an admin.
Yes!!!!
@@lsatenstein admins making 600k-1MM per year? I think not.
OpenSuse is to SLES what Fedora is to RHEL, tardlet.
@@SiriusC1024 Actually..
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is what Fedora is to RHEL. OpenSUSE LEAP is what CentOS was to RHEL.
Really good advice about avoiding software not being cross-platform! Have a plan B. That is key! Right on!
Windows.. :D
@@angulion Absolutely! I've been running Windows 10 for about 4 months now, but got tired of nothing fun happening, so now I run Arch instead =)
The take-home advice: Have a plan B
Yup, TL;DR platform/vendor lock-in should be avoided
And C... and D aaand if You can E,F,... :)
But Yea..
Moral of the story: When you base your company on a free ride being hosted by a commercial company, you're setting yourself for having the rug yanked out on you at any time. If your only use of Red Hat was of CentOS....you weren't a customer.
Two points:
1. RedHat owns Ansible.
2. Canonical could be acquired.
Good points!
"Could be" is just fud.
Cononical is a private company as far as I know so it has to be sold, another company can’t buy it out. Ansible is just a tool and can be fairly easily replaced with one of the plethora of alternatives
1. Ansible is open source, so what's the problem?
2. Canonical being acquired makes no difference to any of his points. He says throughout the video that he's ready to leave them at a moment's notice if he needs to.
@@adamyork2333 1. The problem is that people create huge dependencies into Ansible, and if RedHat decides to alter the product direction/future you will be in trouble. Sure, just fork it, but you will still need to do something about your close relationship with Ansible. 2. I agree completely with his main point which is to change the way we think. Earlier in the video, however, he talks about how unlikely Canonical are to do this and that. By saying that he trusts Canonical he goes a little bit against his own advice. What happens is Microsoft buys Canonical tomorrow?
Great advice man, I believe in you man, that's why I bought your books.
Wise outlook, plan B. I think this will be the motivation to try Arch, Debian, BSD etc. 👍
"Why are you distro hoping so much?!" - "Because shit happens"
Arch for a production environment? That's extreme... 😅
@@geogmz8277 not really. If you actually test before production Arch is pretty good on servers, particularly if you use it as a very light and up to date docker host os. Other advantages include: not having to go through major version upgrades, not worrying about political decisions from parent companies.
@_xenharmony If the problem is that we can't rely on anyone else, then what options are there ? I use Ubuntu, but what if Canonical go the same route as IBM RedHat ?
@@ohdude6643 Distros don't matter. Go figure.
Good that we have the APT distributions. Ran CentOS for a decade now I use Ubuntu and Debian. It was cool though. Thx.
This was news to me today. Earlier this year I’ve made the decision to migrate our core application over to Kubernetes. Initially (more just for our particular use case), I just wanted to move away from certain kinds of server maintenance (particularly due to needing to scale). We were actually pretty tightly bound to CentOS in a few ways. But I’m pretty glad we’re going to k8s, not just to move away from some server admin stuff, but reinforced by this unexpected lifecycle change with CentOS. I’m not surprised either, and I like CentOS, but at least glad we’re not going to rely on CentOS 8 anymore.
I was about to read a big thick book on Red Hat, but now I will get your Ubuntu book instead. So you saved me a lot of wasted reading time! Thanks.
Glad I could help!
Good video. We should also start thinking about why it is companies get to make decisions like this without any consent to the consumers and workers who use and maintain their products. Its about time working people, especially those in the tech sector start organizing across companies and build solidarity to push back against these companies. Having a plan B is great, being a wise consumer is great, but we need to start creating an institution to demand what we want or else we stop running the gears on the whole god damn thing. If we don't do this eventually we will lose the cat and mouse game of running from one distro/software to the next as Amazon,Microsoft and IBM become more efficient at consolidating these tools.
I don't think we have any right to expect a say in decisions regarding something we're getting for free. My problem with this news isn't that it's being done, but that they drastically changed the rules after releasing version 8. Going from 10 years of support to being told you have about a year to move or accept a change that will affect the stability of your servers is the problem here. They should have kept their promise on 8 and just announced that as of version 9, it would change to a rolling release.
I totally agree with you, I personally have 70% of my servers in ubuntu and the other 30 on CentOS, my personal laptop is Manjaro, I believe getting stuck in one distro is a big mistake, also the big fun part of linux is the ability to try and learn something new all the time. But for those who are stuck on CentOS, Mr. Kurtzer already announced he will go ahead with Rocky Linux and just fork CentOS
Thanks for the quality of content you provide to us. I really appreciate someone like you talking in a very professional way about Linux. It is something we always miss in the community! Thanks!
So, true, cross platform.tools is the heart of the tool chain that just makes things reasonably fair for everyone working on infrastructures changes. As a linux admin, I live with "change" and its that idea that allows us to innovate at areas we never dreamed possible. A wonderful eye and mind opening video in my opinion.
Can't believe it. I have relied on CentOS 7 for years. seeing this go down is unbelievable.
I was really expecting CentOS 8 to be around for a while but I guess not.
Moving forward, I guess I just need to write Ansible playbooks that support multiple distros like you ;).
Thanks for the video.
They were gonna do this, no question about it. I agree that suddenly cutting 8 support to 2021 is wild, this was announced near the EOL of 6 so a lot of people just switched to 8 and now are in a pickle. I think as a compromise I would have choosen to shift the support date to match 7.
Thanks, so much, Jay, for your candid remarks. I'm hoping this doesn't occur in Ubuntu since I pre-ordered your 3rd edition "Mastering Ubuntu Server" and look forward to getting into it. I've used Ubuntu for many years and for a time it was my #1 daily desktop driver OS. This is disturbing news for me as I live about 4 hours down the road from the headquarters of Red Hat in Raleigh, NC and feel that for a company that I looked up to when I was teaching CentOS LInux on college campuses could betray those businesses that were all-in with CentOS 8 who will now have to use CentOS Stream or something else altogether is a downright shame. After watching your video, I'm now convinced that you've just made an excellent case for Qubes OS, which is based on both Fedora 30 and Debian 10. I'm putting Qubes OS 4.0.3 through its paces and at a point where I can almost say this is my daily driver OS for the future.
As someone who was a centos fanboy in school, this is sad news for me. Ill address one thing you mentioned, you said you dont know why people hate on Ubuntu... setting up a static IP address frustrated the hell out of me and other students when setting up Ubuntu servers lol. Much easier on centos, so that’s why we navigated towards it more than Ubuntu. Also, thanks for the advice of having more than one solution setup. I just got hired as an solutions analyst for the cloud team to a big company and will use this mindset for all my projects. Love all your videos man, much respect.
I didn't mind Ubuntu at all. I fact during school I preferred it over CentOS. It just felt more comfortable to use. There's not really one thing that stand out to me, but I hear where you're coming from.
In a comment thread a Gentleman named Jose said "If you're used to rpm-based distributions and still want to have the option to 'bridge' the community with the enterprise version of a platform, I would suggest you give OpenSUSE a try." I agree, Open SuSE is stable and easy to administer.
The corps are taking over the Linux OS :-( We need to take Linux back.
Apparently there is a loop hole in the GPL
Brilliant video. I didn't know this happened as I have not used CentOS for a few years. But what I can say from experience is that it is brilliant advice. Companies from Apple, NVIDIA to now sadly Linux distributions treat users more as dependents and ultimately it is us who pay the price for that. There almost never is something for nothing on a large scale - but laughably, this happens *especially* when you pay for products. As you imply, one can only respond by creating flexible use cases. So this is so refreshing to hear. In my case, I ran Ubuntu until Canonical drivers and updates on 20.04 continued to destroy my GPU server and laptops repeatedly and I just moved to Debian which is ... well its great. I had built everything on a container model so the container OS could be dumped in 30 mins. It does depend on use case but what you say is very important for everyone to know - that we still have choice. Thank you very much for posting this and I am so sorry to hear about CentOS - I had considered returning to it a few weeks back : glad now that I did not!
You make perfect sense. imho, this was an AWESOME video; words of wisdom.
I moved from Slack, to Red Hat, to PCLinuxOS, to Linux Mint. But have kept something on Manjaro, Debian, LMDE, and tinkering with a couple others. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Nothing is perfect. Maybe I should start back on Solaris, or FreeBSD, both of which I've used a bit, too.
This video is spot-on.
I've been in IT and the IT-related field since about 1988. I've seen too many changes to count. It's the constant, not stability. Younger IT folks just figure things are a snapshot, not a river of roiled water.
I couldn't agree with you more! The same applies with hardware vendors too. Years ago, I worked in a data center where the Sr. Execs were all so proud that they standardized on Compaq servers. In my mind, I just thought, "you just lost all negotiating leverage when the Compaq sales guy visits your DC." I told them they should standardize on at least 2 vendors, and when the vendor sales people visit, take them on a tour of the DC by walking them past their competitors' products. LOL I walked away when I got the "deer in headlights" reaction from the decision makers.
That said, I'm waiting to see how IBM reacts to the uproar. Then, I'll decide what to do with my centos7 installations when that time comes.
same with me...first touched red hat back in the late '90s and didn't know what i was doing; then was managing a bunch of RHEL systems in 2007 and learned linux that way
A friend of mine is an engineer at nasa and learning centOS is a mandatory part of his training. This is messed up and they should definitely be boycotted. Guess one man distros don't sound too bad after all now.
Btw, the original creator of centOS Gregory Kurtzer has already started on a fork of it called Rocky Linux.
Well if a company decides to go with another FreeOS like Rocky, then the people in the IT department are just as STUPID for going along with this decision!
Do your self a favor and use this experience as a chance to DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME! Buy a supported version of an OS, and save future costs by not having to spend a huge amount of money on labor and development costs AGAIN to completely rebuild the IT infrastructure from the bottom up!
Oh yeah....No wonder SpaceX is beating the S#!t out of Nasa! I bet SpaceX uses a licensed version of OS's on their servers!
As we all know, the United States government is cheap as hell also. I wonder how many installations of CentOS they have? Now we the tax payers are going to have to pay through our A$$es for those upgrades, IF they take place! Hell, the US government is probably still of CentOS 5. LMAO!!!
Yeah let’s boycott a company we are not clients of anywayyyy ... yeah I’ve seen more efficient stuff.
Excellent points. With your proxmox based environment and ansible, moving to a different platform in your case would be trivial: backup data, rebuild new os environment, restore. Probably easier, than upgrading from windows 7 to 10.
This was very disappointing news to read and hear about today. My company uses RHEL and CentOS on most of our production servers mainly because of the long support cycle. I'm the admin of those systems, so this news affects me directly. Fortunately, we're still on v.7 so we'll still have support. That being said, the software that we run on those servers is cross-platform, so we can pivot to an Ubuntu or Debian-based platform without much fuss.
When it comes time to upgrade these servers (hardware and virtual), I can switch to a new OS and my company will be none the wiser. This isn't something that my company's leadership will be worried about unless we have an outage at the data center.
I feel really bad for all those admins who have already migrated to CentOS 8 and will need to have those conversations with leadership. This is really screwed up.
Maybe Oracle could be future option for some? I'd personally consider this. blogs.oracle.com/linux/need-a-stable,-rhel-compatible-alternative-to-centos-three-reasons-to-consider-oracle-linux
You've nailed the essence of the problem with the IBM CentOS decision. Trust erosion. Great advice Great video. Subbed.
I simply changed to the parent distros. All those little fashion distros are as quickly gone as they came up. 🙏
I completely agree with you and you have great courage to make this video. I really appreciate your frank and honest dialogue.
You're more positive than a lot of people. Not sure if that's good or bad. But you've made a lot of good points and I agree. But that really sucked for Redhat to do this to all the people that just got Centos 8 installed and configured for their organization.
Great points, thank you. People do not think that vendor lock-in is possible when using open-source software, but this crisis shows that it is. Having a Vendor Plan B is as essential as having backups.
Although I am using RHEL at work (in the company where I am employed abt. 99% of all Linux hosts run on RHEL), and although I am a bit disappointed to hear that Red Hat are going to ditch CentOS, their decision doesn't really affect me on my private usage of Linux.
Albeit I run Fedora 33 on my laptop, and have another one for fiddling and expetimenting with other distros, that currently has Arch installed, my private requirements are so modest that the SW stuff can run on virtually any distro. I even haven't any Windows host nor VM, because there is only one SW with only Windows binaries that I use, which after minimal fiddling runs flawlessly within the WINE syscall wrapper.
So my private preference for Fedora is soly owed to my laziness, because from work, where we use, as written, RHEL I know how most stuff is configured in the Red Hat realm, i.e. I know the whereabouts of config files, and I do nearly all adaptations in the shell and in vim.
But should one future Fedora release annoy me sufficiently I would have no insurmountable issues with shifting to some other, non-RH related distro.
Thank you for a great video! Great advice, it's easy to get comfortable and not lookout for the future.
Good points Jay, but seeing that most people that work on development,can't always depend on donations to pay the bills, so we can safely say that no public company can always be sell proof.
I have been fhinking about this, but all ican think of is to concetrate our donations to a fewer "brands" but even so that would always reduce user choices. and still guarantee nothing.
Your suggestions are valid of course. Good start, but when you see furter undr currents developing, please keep sharing, your insights are always valuable..
Regards, Nick C.
the developers of cent os are shifting to a Rocky linux
You mean the ~60-80% working for Red Hat?
The community may shift a bit, but RockyLinux is still an empty repository. Building a distribution is hard and needs a lot of expertise. So, it will take time, until Rocky is ready for something. Maybe CloudLinuxOS is faster.
But CentOS developers switching from Red Hat to HCPng will not happen in some measurable degree.
@@daniels1924 Exactly.
Does anyone else member when this was a thing?
linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/130249/CentOS-Project-Administrator-Goes-AWOL
The maintainer was hired by Red Hat after this. I vividly remember installing Scientific Linux during the AWOL.
Also for those new to the group, E of CentOS was for the word Enterprise. If I want rolling, I'm sure Arch can provide.
IBM, is there anything you cannot ruin anymore?
"Halt and Catch Fire" is a pretty half decent Netflix binge for anyone raging at IBM right now.
@@hypnosh2917 This was already a thing in 2014. In this case it has nothing to do with IBM.
I started with Mandrake Linux, and have been with it ever since. It was designed from the ground up for ordinary users like you and me. When the Mandrake company tried to be a pay-for distro and went broke in the process, its team continued Mandriva as Mageia. OpenMandriva is now a Russian distro, and like many users, I have never got it even to start, but Mageia has stayed with Gael Duval's original concept. IMO, it is the only distro that has everything, but is still user-friendly. Every other distro I have tried (including CentOS) has been missing something.
Many people I've talked with aren't as upset with the direction of CentOS as they are with version 8 being released with the promise of 10 years of support and then a year into it, after expensive planning, testing, and migrations have occurred, pulling the rug out from under them and being told they have about a year to figure out what to do. If IBM Red Hat had said, "As of version 9, CentOS will become a rolling release," then people would have had ample time to figure out which direction they wanted to go. The way it was done is the major problem.
Exactly. We waited for CentOS 8 to start major updates, then they announced this. Does RH really think that will push us to purchase RedHat subscriptions? Not after you just showed us your true colors. We'll be shifting our servers to one of the new EL distros (Rocky, Alma, etc).
Another handy tip is if you use a Linux distro store your root directory and home directory separately so its easy for you to switch distros if you ever have to.
That sounds really great then you need to hire people who can do all of that and even think like that and work together on that. Have a IT management team that makes sure that different departments coordinate to keep building on something like that. My company structure and organization is quite madness. Admirable what you say, I would be amazed if your ansible or configuration management is capable of dynamically recreating the same system or workoing functionality on multiple OSes. We work with puppet and use ansible for some orchestration tasks. Interesting what you say in this concept, but really abstract and I guess a lot of work and hard to maintain.
The best Plan B is and always will be vanilla Debian Stable. At least for me , though :)
from debian 9 it's buggy and it getting worse and worse. I'm a fun of debian but debian 11 was last straw
Plan B is good enough. No need for further search ..
@@douglasward718 try to use your stable Debian on pipelines. And you discover the world of bugs for you
@_xenharmony I know how to use system properly. But I don't have such problems on CentOS, Ubuntu, Mint and even Windows. As I said with each version Debian is getting worse and worse. More stupid bugs after clean installation. You answer doesn't resolve them at all. Do you mean create a project with automation tools such an ansible and fix your "stable LTS system" after clean installation? I don't know your background and you don't know my background. Where and how do you use Debian?
CentOS 8 will live on for many, in the form of Amazon Linux 2.
Thanks for the tip. Message was valuable and upbeat.
Been a huge fan of Ubuntu for nearly 14 years...it just keeps getting better.
It have spyware debian doesn't
Most tools I use on CentOS can be move/compile on Ubuntu. The people who don't have $ are the ones using these free OS. When a company does this, people just shift to a different free OS. I remember when MonoWall was abandon, people just moved to pfSense and no one cried about it.
The unforgivable part is as you mentioned, they are going back on the CentOS 8 support commitment. They should have released the plans - CentOS Stream is the future, but we are giving our full commitment of support to CentOS 8, there will just not be a CentOS 9.
I feel the same.. I’ll wipe every computer and shift to something else.
Good call on OS specific tools…
If you’ve been around long enough you know it’s your data that’s valuable,not so much the OS.
The possibilities ...I.B.M around January 12 could announce, "Feed back from commercial and desktop hobby users of Cent OS 8 has been overwhelming. Cent OS is not only loved but also needed. We have decided to not only reverse our decision to end of life Cent Os but to extend suport of all Cent Os products untill 2026. At that time we will make a determination of its future. Happy New Year.
Agree wholeheartedly Jay. I thought Fedora was a Redhat spin too. I really wonder about Windows and the 90% of organisations that are welded in with Windows - expertise, users habits...I'm thinking of the Education department here in Australia...totally welded to Windows and shoving it down the throats of students, teachers - everyone.
What does this event mean to this video series on learning CENTOS? I’ve been following passionately and have learned a lot. I think it’s still useful for people learning about Linux but I wonder if there are going to be more installments
This was a fantastic video however I've worked in information technology a long time. A large portion of these companies are going to submit Redhat a purchase order and pay for the software. Some will continue to pay others may only purchase a year of support giving them more time to migrate off of the platform. You just can't turn on a dime when dealing with large scale deployments.
In debian We trust
This is find if you do not have any external requirements. There are many vendor applications that only support RHEL and downstreams. While maintaining architecture independant configs and deployments, along with tools is an excellent goal, you can't always do that. For now, there is no immediate rush to move from CentOS. If you are on CentOS 7, you can stay there for another 5 years. If you have moved to CentOS 8, you have another year of full support. You can EASILY move your deployed servers from CentOS to another downstream OS, such as Oracle Linux. Soon, the founders of CentOS will be spinning up Ricky Linux to take it's place, so long-term support for EL8 won't be an issue.
Very good advice. Thank you for saying. I use Linux Mint for a couple years now and would really appreciate if you would make (or provide links to others who have made) several different techniques to maintain a distro independent backups.
I just stumbled upon your channel and this video. Content aside, I just wanted to say I *love* that server rack behind you and am very interested in details on it and its contents. I'll check your videos to see if you address that or not. Have a great week and a great holiday season!
You said you have your ansible files available public. So, where can I find them?
I made Oracle Linux my standard distribution at my company years ago. I am now married with that distribution. This video post gives me something to think about.
Cloud Linux will be forking Centos 8 / Rhel 8 to create an open-source. The company announced yesterday. This can be a viable solution for Centos users. Again, I agree with using cross-platform applications to ensure it can easily migrate to a different Linux distribution.
We are currently still using CentOS 6, moving to CentOS 7. Other than security, there isn't a big case for us to keep up-to-date with the latest version. So we aren't in a panic mode, although we have talked about it. Have plenty of time to do the migration
It is very sad IBM is killing CentOS ... They could not compete in the LINUX space... just like they fell asleep at the wheel when they lost the Desktop market and abandoned their O/S 2 in 2000 and gave up on the PC and laptop markets around 2000... and in 2019 bought Red Hat Linux to gain market domination in the server market and get back what they lost to Microsoft and Apple and could not otherwise gain back... Companies will always do what is good for their share holders and what is bad for innovation and open source.
I agree with the cross platform tools. I dont even entertain distro specific tools even if its much easier to use and learn
This is a really great message. You’re right, mindset is very important if you’re going to be successful in navigating the IT world. You spoke of cross tools, such as, Ansible. What are some other tools that you use to protect yourself from shifts like this?
Feels like a good post / video on your thoughts on structuring ansible roles to support multiple platforms would be useful. The default ansible role documentation, is a bit open here, but for experienced admins it feel like there are some conventions that would be useful to address.
I'd love if you'd make that video on how to change distros. I think many other noobs like me, who are doing a lot of hopping in search of their favourite distro, would love it too.
Stick to what works and buy a cat instead.
An alternative to Cento OS would be Oracle Enterprise Linux. Oracle Linux is 100% application binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Oracle Linux is easy to download and completely free to use. Free source code, free binaries, free updates, freely redistributable, free for production use. Been using it for years.
Priceless advice, much appreciated your time with these great video
Moving Centos to upstream totally makes sense to me. People can use Centos and buy Red Hat stuff, products , support etc etc IF or WHEN needed and Fedora is never far away neither... I think they are on the "right track".... Kubernetes recently dropped Docker because various reasons... meanwhile Centos had already adopted Podman as Docker replacement in their Redhat product line (Openshift) etc. Compared to other "Linux companies"... they have no competitors (except for their poor ARM support which sucks maybe). Also it seems to me Red Hat still have many of most active Linux Kernel contributors as employees, for this reason alone I doubt anyone will walk too far away from them.
Good logic, well stated, appreciate your opinion. I don't get how people don't just move on. Hey, use your noodle, just look at the distrowatch charts... leaders change all the time. Companies come and go. Knowledge is power. Adaptability and open community are at the heart of Linux.
It's not the end of time. IBM invested in Linux, decades ago. Redhat became a great company in the Linux field and IBM acquired Redhat. In a way that's not a big surprise at all. CentOS in its enterprise like setup long time ago made me switch to Debian and Debian based distributions. They require less hardware in order to run. Arch Linux is also a great option. Sooner or later people would be happy with the end CentOS :) So many better solutions are possible
At 5:35 - it does matter if you've paid for it or not. If one party is not giving anything in exchange, it's a low quality (business) relationship.
A different takeaway here is that financially supporting our favorite software would actually be a wise long term strategy for the open source community.
Indeed, change our mindset.
Switch to Debian folks.. It's always been rock solid distro and drama free for a few years now.
openSUSE
@@jothain I just switched to openSUSE, it's pretty solid but I miss the autoremove.
Well, only if you don't find drama in systemd. I do have my fair share of beefs with it but it does have major advantages over the old and terrible sysVinit.
Use community based distros, like BSDs and Debian. These are suitable for desktops, laptops and servers.
BSD's are not community based actually
@@MichaelDavydoff They are, how can you claim otherwise? Even CentOS was, just that upstream was dependent on RHEL.
@@mzs114 they are not. please, stops trying to twist it. it doesn't change anything. centos was just leaf of rhel, not community-based actually, so it's got up here where it is
@@MichaelDavydoff Lol, you are not presenting any credible reference to support your "claims", and instead deflecting, btw, the C in CentOS itself stands for "Community" in it. :D Setting aside CentOS, still waiting for how BSDs are not community based?
@@mzs114 Well, the term "community-based" itself is vague, I think. Depending on how you define the term, even Ubuntu can be "community-based". He probably (just guessing here) meant that since BSD started off as something owned by a company (Bell Labs, which was owned by ATnT at the time) it's not a community-based project.
Again, this largely depend on how you define the term "community-based".
With Rocky Linux and CloudLinux both stepping up, I think things will end up being okay. And I love my Ubuntu and Linux Mint, but I can use Debian as well.
CloudLinux isn't free either last time I checked, might as well just pay IBM if cost was the only reason you used CentOS vs RHEL. Hadn't heard of Rocky Linux until now, but then I've never been a huge fan of RPM-based distros in general. I'll check it out regardless.
@@W1ldTangent check their announcement
@@javabeanz8549 ahh, interesting announcements. Shame that Scientific Linux just withered and died years back, but it does appear that there will once again be two healthy, free re-distributions of RHEL. Competition and alternatives are good. And who knows, SL might make a comeback.
You have some very good points especially the one about the change in mindset. Redhat were always a sellout and people don’t understand this. I stopped using redhat almost 20 years ago. People need to understand that opensource does not mean free and choose their distros carefully. I switched to Debian years ago thinking I might just go all the way back to freebsd where i come from. Ubuntu really put linux on the desktop. My 2 cents.
Well stated and thoughtfull. I'm not suprised...IBM ... BIgBlue is kinda like this-always have been. I;'d love to see the Mint Team come out with a "CentoOS Spin".
I am just stepping into Linux world, marching onward to LPIC-1 certification, gaining some practical experience. I am very happy to find your channel, many thanks for what you're doing. I've been doing my training with CentOS-based environment both in my lab and production. I feel like it's time to switch to Debian/Ubuntu.
This entire thing feels like a thinly-veiled criticism of Capitalism and in lovin’ it.
Either way, great vid! I was about a week from moving everything to CentOS 8 when this happened, we’re probably moving to Debian now. What an ordeal....
Sigh. I was skirting the Ansible solution for a bunch of Ubuntu servers, but this argument makes a ton of sense. Guess I'll have to buckle down and learn to use it. Thanks for the other links.
Companies exist to make profit. Free Linux distros that compete with paid Linux distros owned by the same company are endangered. A similar event was seen with Oracle's acquisition of Java, and MYSQL. I really liked CENTOS. I also liked SUSE, and UBUNTU. All we can do is wait and see. Just be flexible, and prepared to shift.
Wonderful instruction, thank you.
One question (and do apologize my naivety in the Linux and Orchestration history): How does Opswork being tied to AWS any different from Ansible? What if Red Hat decides to charge or change their model structure for Ansible? I could be wrong but it is a question I am trying to get a grasp. At the end, you will be tied into something.. It seems like it is a matter of who and how much options are provided (if any).
In terms of never relying on a single platform. If it really *is* that important to you. If you really need it, what you need is a contract. What you're describing is doing a bunch of extra work across multiple platforms when, for an enterprise, what you probably want is a contractual agreement with a legal entity.
I think rolling back Centos 8 support to end of 2021 is a really bad decision. AFAIK it was originally scheduled to last till 2029. Scaling it back to 2025 when support for Centos 7 ends would be a bit more reasonable.
Also, they have said there will be options on Red Hat, but they should have had that ready when this was announced.
I have a personal server I was about to migrate to Centos 8, so I'm grateful I hadn't gone ahead with it yet.
Rocky Linux looks interesting, though.
It doesn't effect me. Slackware is still going strong.
This is the way.
Wow... I've not seen slackware since.. maybe 1998. What does slack give you that gentoo doesn't? I mean isn't slack basically here, install this initial binary distro to get started, then you're on your own to download and compile the latest upstream sources. At least gentoo has configs already in place that more or less keep up automatically downloading and building the latest tested upstream sources right?
@@phillipsusi1791 there's a thriving community of packagers (eg. Ponce/sbo) that means there's very little that needs to be self-compiled. I won't say it's as seamless as the repo stores of Ubuntu or centos but it's pretty good. Yes there's no dependency checking but we're fine with that. Precise control of your system is what slackware is about.
Slackware 64 current has been good for me. I remember the walnut creek CDs, I started a couple of versions before Slackware 96.
@@RobbyPedrica You mean they have a frequently updated online repository these days instead of just a new cd release every few years? ;)
The harsh reality is that proprietary OSs are more likely to around for longer since they are financially sustainable and highly profitable. Most shiny distros will throw users under the bus when Silicon Valley comes knocking. Another harsh reality is that cross-platform software is usually less stable than platform-specific software.
Grandpa always said never put all your eggs in one basket... Hannibal on the A Team always has a plan B, Always!
Love Tv Quotes! LOL
You are right, I have a Ubuntu Server and I am setting up a Debian one just because. That is why I have Mint, Arch, MX, Debian systems as drivers. Plan B!
I feel sorry for all the IT's for sure... Did some of that years ago...
Thanks for the video!
LLAP
Well said, never put all your chips in on one thing. The plus is you learn more about different distributions.