[CentOS] CentOS Stream suitability as a production webserver

Tue Jan 5 19:32:00 UTC 2021
Jamie Burchell <mail at jamieburchell.com>

Hello

I've recently discovered the announcement regarding the change in direction
for the CentOS project and I imagine like many others, I'm confused and
concerned about what this means moving forward.

I work for a small web development agency and we offer hosting as part of
our package to clients who need it. We have many CentOS 7 web servers
(DigitalOcean droplets) (LAMP/LEMP) that I look after and today I'm
thankful I have only migrated one of those to CentOS 8, given the recent
announcement about its curtailed EOL. I literally just went to the Wiki
today to confirm the EOL date for EL7 and boy am I glad I spotted it.

Given we are not developing drivers or applications (other than websites
and web applications), is the change a non-issue for my use-case? I've seen
it written that CentOS Stream is the "development version" of RHEL but also
that we shouldn't have considered RHEL to be the beta for CentOS. Others
have said to think of CentOS more like RHEL RC-1. I just don't know how the
stability will compare and we have historically always chosen CentOS for
its stability (and of course price).

Sure, I could migrate to Ubuntu (I use this locally in WSL), but I've
become somewhat "comfy slippers" with CentOS and have built our setup
around it (including custom ansible scripts etc) and don't want to change
everything unncessarily.

Of course, a lot of this is somewhat dependent on what DigitalOcean will
decide to provide image wise moving forward.

I'm sorry if this has already been answered, I spent a good few hours
reading through the respective threads in the devel list and ended up more
confused than I started.

Cheers,
Jamie