Since its introduction in 1994, Red Hat Linux has accompanied developers on a journey of nearly 30 years. In 2014, Red Hat recruited key members of the CentOS community, including project leaders and core project contributors at the time. Red Hat and the CentOS project have joined forces to develop next-generation Linux innovations for enterprise IT. Over the years, we've seen open source models continue to thrive, driving the rise of Linux containers, Kubernetes, microservices, serverless, and more. Given the rapid pace of community-driven innovation, community leadership decided in 2019 to introduce a new model to the CentOS Linux community: CentOS Stream, shifting community work upstream. CentOS Stream is a developer-oriented distribution designed to help community members, Red Hat partners, and others take advantage of open source innovations in a more stable and predictable Linux ecosystem.
The biggest impact on end users is the gradual cessation of maintenance and updates by CentOS Linux 7 and 8. How do existing CentOS Linux operating system users cope? What strategies and practical experiences can be learned? In the face of the common problems of users and developers, Amazon Cloud Technology Tech Talk specially invited Zhu He, Senior Solution Architect at Red Hat, to bring the relevant technical sharing of the theme of "Corresponding Solutions and Technical Practices after the CentOS Operating System Stops Maintenance".
1
After centOS was discontinued, the Linux ecosystem changed
Many developers can't sort out the relationship between the various versions in the Linux ecosystem. Let's start with a retrospective: Beginning in 2014, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem has led to the synergy of Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS Linux. The upstream of the community provides continuous innovation and technical architecture integration of desktop operating systems to a wide range of development engineers through Fedora, releasing a version approximately every 6 months; Midstream is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, mainly for enterprises and application developers, characterized by stability, security and performance optimization, and the pace of product iteration and development is orderly; downstream is community-led CentOS Linux, for cost-sensitive users and ecological developers. CentOS Linux version, product iteration rhythm closely follow RHEL, users can enjoy the benefits of Red Hat RHEL at zero cost at the same time.
Seven years later, the CentOS Linux community began to make adjustments in 2021, gradually stopping the CentOS Linux 7 and 8 versions that were more downstream positioning. The main work of the CentOS community will shift upstream of RHEL and develop and maintain a new version of CentOS Linux, CentOS Stream.
CentOS Stream is a Linux development platform from the CentOS project designed to increase transparency and collaboration around the Red Hat Enterprise Linux development process. CentOS Stream is open to anyone and is free to use for all. It is primarily aimed at developers, partners, and end users. These characters are able to get new RHEL features in advance through CentOS Stream, and on this basis, they can do things such as developing third-party components to expand their impact on the RHEL ecosystem. The equivalent of centOS Stream is a test field for RHEL. The ecological positioning of Fedora and RHEL has not changed during this process. Users can obtain the installation media for CentOS Stream from the following address:
https://centos.org/download
The CentOS community moves from downstream to upstream, and the release of CentOS Stream will also have some impact on users who are originally making CentOS downstream. The current changes in CentOS versions are as follows:
CentOS Linux 6 was discontinued as early as November 2020;
CentOS Linux 8 stops updating at the end of 2021;
CentOS Stream 8 will be discontinued on May 31, 2024, inherited from CentOS Linux 8;
CentOS Linux 7 has a large number of users, and this version will be discontinued on June 30, 2024;
CentOS Stream 9 was released in the second quarter of 2021, and Red Hat is developing RHEL 9 products based on CentOS Stream 9.
There will be no new versions of CentOS Linux in the community in the future, only CentOS Stream will continue to move forward.
With this in mind, Red Hat recommends that CentOS Linux users take action in advance and choose a suitable path to begin the migration as soon as possible.
2
Key factors in migrating to a new operating system
When you work on migration, you should adopt different migration strategies for different users. When enterprise users migrate to a new operating system, they will consider the cost factor, smooth transition and service support three perspectives, and then split into eight key factors to make decisions:
Migration and conversion is simple with minimal business disruption
Run stably and lay a solid IT foundation
Production-grade, stability, support and security
Professional support to protect your IT team
A large partner ecosystem supports multiple vendor choices
The long-term value of lifecycle support and version flexibility
You can count on a clear product roadmap
Proactively analyze the environment to reduce risk for your business
Several common conversion strategies for CentOS users include:
After the end of the life cycle, it is directly offline, and there are very few applicable scenarios.
Move to other community free versions, such as Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, or domestic community versions. But this path is riskier because these community versions differ a lot from CentOS.
Move to domestic and foreign distributions such as SUSE, Amazon Linux 2.
Move to Red Hat-led communities or distributions such as CentOS Stream or RHEL.
If you just want to do some functional verification and compatibility verification work on the operating system environment, or if you are ready to develop your own community Linux version based on CentOS, emphasizing code contributions and fixing problems, then it is more appropriate to switch to CentOS Stream. However, given the short lifecycle of this release, the difficulty of meeting compliance requirements, the lack of security certification, the irregular pace of updates, and the lack of commercial support, Red Hat does not recommend running CentOS Stream in production.
Based on the new upstream and downstream relationships of the Linux community after 2021, Red Hat recommends that users use Fedora for test development baselines and develop software components compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on CentOS Stream for desktop usage scenarios and operating system development needs. Production environment critical business loads are recommended to run on enterprise-grade Linux RHEL. In addition, a new direction is the container packaging and production process, which requires the base image as a base. To this end, Red Hat provides a unified base image based on Linux RHEL, or UBI, that enables users to build and distribute unified and secure enterprise applications on top of a standard underlying container OS.
3
On Amazon Cloud Technology, experience how a fully upgraded Linux is different
Amazon Cloud Technology has been a Red Hat Certified Global Cloud Service Provider (CCSP) since 2008 and can use Red Hat RHEL operating system products on Amazon Cloud Technology in a variety of ways. The first is called the PAYG method ("pay-as-you-go"), which can be directly selected on Amazon Cloud Technology to subscribe to the corresponding instance. The other is called the BYOS approach, which is a user-brought subscription to the cloud, which is more suitable for customers who have already purchased a Red Hat subscription to implement a hybrid cloud deployment strategy.
Amazon Cloud Technology Red Hat RHEL products have three main lines:
The standard Enterprise Linux subscription is the technical standard RHEL version.
Proprietary version for SAP Hana.
RHEL UBI products for containerized applications.
OpenShift products, Red Hat middleware, and containerized storage can all be certified and tested on Amazon Cloud Technologies.
The combination of Red Hat RHEL and Amazon infrastructure environments delivers higher performance benefits and build stability than traditional infrastructure environments. Users can use a flexible, stable, and efficient operating environment on the cloud environment to build a future-oriented hybrid cloud infrastructure, freely choosing which applications to deploy on-premises and which applications to deploy on the public cloud, and better combine the two.
The RHEL environment provided by Amazon Cloud Technology is optimized to provide users with the best experience out of the box. Enterprise-grade Linux features have also been brought to the public cloud, where compute workloads can be run. Amazon Cloud Technologies' business analytics capabilities can also be combined with RHEL to help users better understand the health of their environment. In some more flexible use cases, installing an application on the cloud can save money and cost while ensuring the best performance of the application.
On Amazon Cloud Technologies, RHEL is also able to provide high availability (HA), providing reliability, availability, and scalability for critical production workloads. HA enables the resolution of single points of failure and automatically cuts to new nodes, guaranteeing flexibility and uninterrupted service.
There are many benefits for users running business-critical applications with Enterprise Linux on Amazon Cloud Technologies, which can be summarized as follows:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a decade-long major release lifecycle, including more advanced security features, patches, related guidance, and technical support efforts. Red Hat also offers in-place upgrade tools to make migrations easy and easy.
RHEL has a predictable, production-friendly release cadence that allows users to plan their own version upgrade strategies and paths. RHEL also provides complete documentation and support to help users better plan for updates.
RHEL brings many enterprise-grade built-in features for security and compliance, such as automated tools, regular proactive release and update notifications, pushes, and a knowledge base for easy access to related issues and information. Red Hat subscriptions also have Red Hat Insights tools for management, automation, and predictive analytics.
Red Hat's Convert2RHEL tool simplifies the upgrade path by allowing users to perform in-place upgrades on centOS environments.
For a wide range of RHEL users, Red Hat RHEL on Amazon Cloud Technologies offers a comprehensive, highly flexible subscription plan. Especially for individual and enterprise developers, Red Hat has a zero-cost developer available subscription.
4
Move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration practices
If a user chooses to switch from CentOS to RHEL, Amazon Cloud Technology offers tools to help users get the job done and ensure they enjoy the value of a Red Hat subscription.
There are two main conversion paths:
Pre-built images for the public cloud. When the customer applies for a node on the virtual instance of Amazon Cloud Technology, the customer selects RHEL, and the virtual environment installed uses the public cloud pre-built image. Amazon provides some CentOS pre-built images in its own cloud marketplace, so users who use CentOS on the cloud only need to select the corresponding RHEL image in the cloud marketplace, deploy new instances, and quickly switch to RHEL. Switching images requires redeploying related applications, backing up and exporting data, and there is some migration effort.
For CentOS used in on-premises data centers, Red Hat provides migration services and tools to help users migrate to RHEL through self-service and on-site implementations. If users want to deploy to Amazon Cloud Technology at the same time, Amazon Cloud Technology will provide some custom cloud RHEL image application tools and methods to help users make Amazon Cloud Technology application images of AMI, so that users can customize the image to the cloud, and at the same time meet the needs of RHEL-related applications to the cloud.
Red Hat has simplified migrations by introducing the Convert2RHEL standardization tool, which also supports migration from Oracle's Linux to RHEL. Convert2RHEL automatically determines the conversion path based on the CentOS version, replacing the CentOS Community Pack with the Red Hat Genuine RHEL Toolkit. After the conversion, the operating system restarts, completely replaces with the RHEL version, activates, and completes the Red Hat RHEL subscription. RhEL 7 for CentOS Linux 7 or Oracle Linux 7, RHEL 8 for CentOS Linux 8 or Oracle Linux 8.
This switching scheme will bring many benefits:
No need to redeploy the operating system or applications, can be upgraded in situ;
The original environment configuration is retained;
Built-in fail-safe and disaster recovery, support for version rollback;
The migration process is very short and the maintenance window is small;
Activate your Red Hat Linux subscription immediately after conversion, simplifying the process;
This procedure allows you to obtain the latest RHEL version.
Zhu He demonstrated the process of quickly converting the CentOS operating system to RHEL with Convert2RHEL.
Due to the different dependencies between the upper-level application and the operating system, when the impact of upgrading the system on the former is relatively large, the user also needs to implement a migration process. For example, some applications will be tested for compatibility with the new environment before migration, and the application may need to be reconfigured during the migration process, such as splitting and aggregation. The refactoring process may do some application development work, do some modification or optimization, or migrate old hardware to new hardware, and so on. The migration process is implemented to address the various issues caused by the migration of operating systems.
Red Hat helps users guide or plan project migrations, providing a range of assistance and comprehensive management services. Red Hat assists users in evaluating and sorting out the infrastructure of the data center operating environment, helps users examine application compatibility and migration feasibility at runtime, and provides corresponding consulting assistance in application development and optimization.
Red Hat can provide on-site O&M support for cross-platform, application reclamation, deployment design, and other issues during the migration process to ensure a smooth transition until the migration is complete.
Amazon Cloud Technologies' environment can also use Red Hat RHEL images in many ways, including cloud marketplace AMIs, private AMIs, custom AMI cloud migrations, official Red Hat Gold images, and versions of Amazon AMIs provided by third-party partners. The most direct way for domestic users is to image, build and build images in the cloud market. If no applicable version or available options are available, RHEL users can still migrate RHEL to Amazon Cloud Technologies through custom AMI images supported by Red Hat. Red Hat enables standard commercial subscription customers to deploy on-promise subscriptions from data centers directly to amazon cloud environments.
5
summary
In summary, it can be seen that CentOS originated from RHEL, and enterprises can migrate to RHEL to obtain the greatest security, stability, reliability guarantee, and the greatest protection of existing assets. Through the subscriptions, products, and services provided by Red Hat, combined with the services and support provided by Amazon Cloud Technology during the CentOS conversion process, it can help users solve the problems caused by CentOS downtime.
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