| guide | As a future release of CentOS , CentOS Stream represents the best way to further drive Linux innovation, bringing the broader ecosystem community closer to the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. |
"The world is constantly changing, and the development process is constantly innovating and optimizing. Red Hat believes that it is more optimal to put CentOS Stream before RHEL. The scenario of CentOS Stream will be better than the past CentOS and more suitable for the entire community. development." Cao Hengkang said.
In 2020, Red Hat announced that it will end service support for CentOS 8 and CentOS 7 on December 31, 2021 and June 30, 2024, respectively, and concentrate the work and investment of the CentOS project on CentOS Stream to further Drive Linux innovation.
Now that CentOS 8 is out of maintenance, and CentOS 7 will be out of service in two years, the discussion about CentOS has become more and more intense. What is the difference between CentOS Stream and CentOS? What value can CentOS Stream bring to users? What are the strategic priorities of CentOS Stream in the future?
With these questions in mind, Bitnet interviewed Mr. Cao Hengkang, Global Vice President of Red Hat and President of Greater China.
As an open source solution provider, Red Hat has always adhered to the open source development model and the principle of upstream priority, and is closely connected with the open source community to develop solutions with partners, customers, and open source developers.
From 2014 to 2019, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem gradually formed Fedora for the community, RHEL for the private sector, and CentOS for partners, upstream, and communities. Among them, Fedora is an operating system for daily applications built by community enthusiasts, and a new version is released every six months; RHEL is aimed at enterprises and application development partners, and has extremely high security and stability; CentOS is developed by The version derived from the RHEL source code is mainly aimed at cost-sensitive users and ecosystem developers, and the version iteration is usually completed shortly after the RHEL update.
Why stop CentOS?
As a reprinted version of RHEL, CentOS is very popular in the market due to its open source, free, and stable features. However, the development of the times has put forward higher requirements for open source innovation. In order to create a better innovation environment, Red Hat has redesigned and launched a better community version, CentOS Stream.
CentOS Stream sits between Fedora and RHEL and is an upstream open source development platform where users can develop, test and contribute to a continuously released distribution that sits in front of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In other words, the functions developed by Red Hat on RHEL have been completed on CentOS Stream. The functions of the two are basically the same. The difference is that RHEL is a subscription version, and CentOS Stream is a community version.
Cao Hengkang pointed out that the reason why Red Hat invests in CentOS Stream is mainly because CentOS is downstream of RHEL, and partners will not feed back to the upstream community after adding functions to CentOS, so it becomes a branch of CentOS. Without maintenance, it will slowly become an "orphan" and disappear slowly. But conversely, if CentOS Stream is placed upstream of RHEL, then many of Red Hat's ecological partners will get new features of future RHEL versions faster, and will develop new features in CentOS Stream and RHEL .
Taking patching as an example, if a hacker attacks Linux, using RHEL Red Hat will immediately print out the patch and release it to all users. The risk for CentOS users is very high, because the version of CentOS is usually released after RHEL, so the patch cannot be updated in time. But CentOS Stream is different, because it is a product that Red Hat is still developing, and Red Hat will immediately patch all the patches so that users can get the patches quickly. This is a big difference.
How to choose the right Linux platform?
Now that CentOS has been deactivated, there are generally two options for users, one is to migrate to CentOS Stream, and the other is to consider using the Red Hat RHEL subscription version. Besides, can users migrate the production environment to other Linux platforms?
In this regard, Cao Hengkang gave six aspects that need to be paid attention to when choosing a platform in the post-CentOS era:
First, whether the code is really open source. There are many manufacturers on the market that hang the logo of open source, but actually do not do open source. In the past, many manufacturers took CentOS, added some functions, and repackaged them for sale.
Second, code rights protection. Make sure that you will not infringe on other people's intellectual property rights. Once you use the infringing code and are accused of infringement, the amount of compensation is very high. Red Hat RHEL is sure that the code is not infringing.
Third, the delivery method. The delivery method is to have a very good service, if you have any questions, just make a call, and someone will provide support and service 24 hours a day.
Fourth, service response time. The function of CentOS is very good, and there is no problem with the function at all, but everything has to be done by yourself.
Fifth, product life cycle & technology ecology. After any version of Red Hat comes out, it must have a very long life cycle, so don't worry about the need to constantly update, reconfigure and make some changes.
Sixth, product stability. The stability, security, and reliability of the Linux platform are a very important decision-making factor.
At the end of the interview, Cao Hengkang also revealed the future plan of CentOS Stream at the technical level. He said that CentOS Stream is a continuous delivery version of RHEL. Using DevOps, CI/CD to develop enterprise-level operating systems and achieve the unity of stability and agility is itself a highlight of the technology. In this way, innovation based on CentOS Stream will be further stimulated.
In addition, in terms of specific technical efforts, support for different architectures, new hardware, and different application scenarios, as well as the cloud, virtualization, containers, and cloud native that Red Hat has been working on, are all future focuses.
In the end, as a future version of CentOS, CentOS Stream represents the best way to further drive Linux innovation, bringing the broader ecosystem community closer to the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For more Linux information, please check: https://www.linuxprobe.com