Apparently it is the end of CentOS as we know it. Check this out:
https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/
Obviously many ppl right now are in a state of panic considering they liked not having to worry about that layer of their infrastructure (you know, stable os, no major changes between versions of installed software, security patches, etc etc) but then locking yourself to one vendor always comes with the risk of that vendor changing how they do things and if you’re not prepared you’ll feel the cost.
Now, with CentOS being what it used to be, it’s no wonder many companies use it but now thanks to this development ppl need to rethink how to proceed next.
Possible options:
- stick with CentOS7 for a few more years, enjoy a few more years of piece of mind and leave the problem for the employees that are still present in the company at that time
- go for it , flip to CentOS Stream and be a bit more agile , perhaps assume responsibility for your decision and do more testing before deploying to prod
- flip to a different distro that is compatible (I’m certain many forks will magically appear, already saw an announcement from CloudLinux: https://blog.cloudlinux.com/announcing-open-sourced-community-driven-rhel-fork-by-cloudlinux as well as one from the original founder of CentOS Linux: https://news.itsfoss.com/rocky-linux-announcement) OR flip to a distro that is not RPM based BUT does provide that sweet LTS model (Debian for example)
- or maybe do things in a different way going forward (my personal favorite) to prevent vendor locking and be more agile / flexible like design your services to work on various distributions, perhaps change your standards to use the Linux OSs that are LSBx compatible and use systemd, stuff like that and let config management (IaC) do the job for you
I will not go into too many details here but, long story short, this is yet another example of a corporation making the choice to cut down expenses or make more profits by forcing ppl to go for the licensed or managed version of their product which is 99,9% community and 0.1% optimized / modified / improved by them.
My advice to you all out there that are suffering because of CentOS going awol would be to stop being lazy and start doing more on your own as well as learning about other shit like how zypper works, how deb packages are created, how to work with pkg or better yet how to create your own damn Gentoo binary distribution as well as how to fucking compile a kernel to add that much needed support for hardware which RedHat keeps removing from their releases.
That was my 2cents on the matter … glad they decided to do this because truth be told rolling releases are they way forward (personal favorite Linux – Gentoo – has been doing this for many many many years … oddly enough you can’t even call Gentoo a Linux distro … more like a meta-distribution apparently … look it up, don’t take my word for it 🙂 )