On 1/7/2021 7:42 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Thu, Jan 07, 2021 at 09:43:09AM +0000, Chan, Catherine [ITS] wrote:
Question 2
In the announcement, it states 'If you are using CentOS Linux 8 in a production environment, and are concerned that CentOS Stream will not meet your needs, we encourage you to contact Red Hat about options.' Can you highlight what are the drawbacks of CentOS Stream causing not encouraged to run on a production environment?
These same drawbacks apply to traditional CentOS Linux. Red Hat has never officially recommended CentOS _anything_ for production use. With CentOS, there are no service agreements, no support, no one committed to making sure your problems are resolved in a timely manner (beyond the best efforts of volunteers). A lot of people can live with that, but for real production, Red Hat's business is based on the idea that the value of a subscription is, well, valuable to you.
You mention that you are in a university. Are your servers for academic (teaching, learning, and research) use or are the part of university administration? If it's the former, stay tuned for upcoming new RHEL access programs which may apply to you.
* CentOS Linux (as a *product*) is free as in speech.
* RedHat Enterprise Linux (as a *product*), when licensed for education/non-commercial/whatever program use, is free as in beer.
If the "RHEL access programs" were announced three months ago (perhaps with a beefed-up UBI package set) there would have been cheers across the internet... myself in the chorus! And what's not to like? We've all always been pushing people to use Official RHEL when possible; you get to support the work RH does for Linux overall, your sysadmin team gets the ability to call a lifeline at 3am if necessary, your sales reps get to put a bunch of certification logos on your product, etc. However, with RedHat actively indicating that it sees no value in this ecosystem, no value in general goodwill, and seemingly doing it's best Face-Heel Turn, such a move carries much more risk.
Of course, there's always a risk that a Free-as-in-Speech EL rebuild project will go away (as CentOS Linux 8 will in 11 months), but a 4 or 5 digit installation running on a Free OS has already factored that risk in, and it can be increasingly mitigated with resiliency as independent rebuild projects spin back up (as they now must do).
The "risk" in CentOS Linux was that moving to Scientific Linux or another rebuild might not be completely drop-in replacement. The "risk" that comes with a free-but-non-Free OS in production is qualitatively different, and much more suspect now than it was two months ago.
-jc