CentOS is gone, but RHEL is now free for up to 16 production servers

Last month, Red Hat caused much consternation in the Linux hobbyist and small business world by announcing the discontinuation of CentOS Linux.

A long-standing tradition – and the ambiguity in the terms displayed by Red Hat – has led users to believe that CentOS 8 would be available until 2029, just like the RHEL 8 it was based on. Red Hat’s early termination of CentOS 8 in 2021 wiped out eight of those 10 years, leaving thousands of users stranded.

CentOS Stream

Red Hat’s December announcement of CentOS Stream – which it originally touted as a “replacement” for CentOS Linux – has left many users confused about its role in the updated Red Hat ecosystem. This week, Red Hat clarifies the highlights as follows:

To sum up: we’re making CentOS Stream the collaboration hub for RHEL, with the landscape looking like this:

• Fedora Linux is the place to be for major innovations, thoughts and ideas regarding new operating systems – this is basically where the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is located.
  born.
• CentOS Stream is the streaming platform that becomes the next minor release from RHEL.
• RHEL is the intelligent operating system for production workloads, used in nearly every industry in the world, from cloud-scale deployments in mission-critical data centers and localized server rooms to public clouds and up to ‘at the edge of corporate networks.

While CentOS Stream may be considered appropriate and perfectly adequate for hobbyists and home labs, the lack of a long and well-defined lifecycle made it unsuitable for most production uses and, in particular, production by workshops that have chosen a RHEL compatible distribution. in the first place.

New free, economical and simplified RHEL access

Effective February 1, 2021, Red Hat will make RHEL available at no cost to small production workloads – with “small” defined as 16 or fewer systems. This access to RHEL toll-free production is through the new Red Hat Developer Subscription program, and there are no strings attached – in Red Hat’s terms, “this is not a sales program, and no sales rep will follow. “

Red Hat is also extending the availability of developer subscriptions to teams, as well as individual users. In the future, RHEL subscribed customers can add entire development teams to the developer subscription program at no cost. This allows the entire team to use Red Hat Cloud Access for simplified RHEL deployment and maintenance on well-known cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

In light of public outrage over the anticipated demise of CentOS 8, we reached out to Red Hat for clarification regarding uptime guarantees – in particular, if a guarantee was given that the terms of free use in small production will remain valid for the duration of general support for the RHEL version they cover. After some deliberation, here is the official response:

A Red Hat subscription gives you access to all available versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, except those with extended support. This access ends when the subscription ends, as does access to all documentation, support, services, fixes, etc., so it is important to think of the subscription separately from the platform. form.

The Red Hat Developer program is not an overnight or quick product program; it has been around since early 2015 with multi-system deployments supported starting in 2018. The big change today is that now a small number of production systems can now be included in the home subscription, but the program itself has proven itself. We never removed anything from the program, only added to it, highlighted by today’s announcement.

The individual developer subscription is currently configured as a one-year subscription. Renewals will be a straightforward process as close to “clicking a button” as possible. We have no intention of terminating this program and have configured it to be sustainable – we want to continue to give users who want to use RHEL access to it. The main reason we need a subscription term is that it is legally difficult to offer unlimited terms globally and new laws are coming into force, for example GDPR, we must be able to update the terms and conditions. This is similar to how our customers buy Red Hat subscriptions for fixed terms, not in perpetuity.

Our intention is to keep small production use cases as a key part of the Red Hat Developer program and the Individual Developer subscription to help bring enterprise level Linux to more users.