Last month, Red Hat caused a lot of consternation in the enthusiastic and small business Linux world when it announced the discontinuation of CentOS Linux.
The longstanding tradition – and the ambiguity in terms posted by Red Hat – led users to believe that CentOS 8 would be available by 2029, as well as the RHEL 8 on which it was based. Red Hat’s early termination of CentOS 8 in 2021 eliminated eight of those 10 years, leaving thousands of users lost.
CentOS Stream
Red Hat’s announcement of CentOS Stream in December – which was initially announced as a “replacement” for CentOS Linux – left many users confused about its role in the updated Red Hat ecosystem. This week, Red Hat clarifies the main points as follows:
To summarize: we are making CentOS Stream the collaboration hub for RHEL, with a scenario similar to this:
- Fedora Linux is the place for the main innovations, thoughts and ideas of the new operating system – essentially, this is where the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is.
we are born.- CentOS Stream is the continuously delivered platform that becomes the next minor version of RHEL.
- RHEL is the intelligent operating system for production workloads, used in almost every sector of the world, from cloud-scale deployments in mission-critical data centers and server rooms located on public clouds to remote edges of corporate networks.
Although CentOS Stream can be considered appropriate and perfectly suited for enthusiasts and domestic workers, the lack of a long and well-defined life cycle has made it unsuitable for most production uses and especially the production use by stores that have chosen a RHEL-compliant distribution first.
New RHEL access simplified and free of charge
Beginning February 1, 2021, Red Hat will make RHEL available free of charge for small production workloads – with “small” set to 16 systems or less. This access to production RHEL at no cost is through the newly expanded Red Hat Developer Subscription program and comes with no strings – in Red Hat’s words, “this is not a sales program and no sales representative will follow up. “
Red Hat is also expanding the availability of developer subscriptions for teams, as well as for individual users. In the future, subscribing RHEL customers can add entire development teams to the developer’s subscription program at no cost. This allows the entire team to use Red Hat Cloud Access for simplified RHEL implementation and maintenance at well-known cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Considering the previous public outrage over the early disappearance of CentOS 8, we contacted Red Hat for clarification on availability guarantees – specifically, if any assurance was given that the free small production use terms will remain valid for the duration from general support to the RHEL version they cover. After some deliberation, this was 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 well as access to all related documentation, support, services, patches, etc., so it is important to think about the subscription separately from the platform.
The Red Hat Developer program is not an improvised or rapidly produced program; it has been around since the beginning of 2015 with multiple system deployments supported since 2018. The big change today is that now a small number of production systems can be included in the subscription for individuals, but the program itself is tested and proven . We never removed anything from the program, we just added it to it, highlighted by today’s announcement.
The individual developer’s subscription is currently configured as a one-year subscription. Renewals will be a simple process, as close to “clicking a button” as possible. We have no intention of ending this program and we set it up to be sustainable – we want to continue giving users who want to use RHEL access to it. The main reason why we need a subscription term is because it is legally difficult to offer unlimited terms globally and, as new laws come into force, for example, the GDPR, we need to be able to update the terms and conditions. This is similar to how our customers buy Red Hat subscriptions for fixed terms, not forever.
Our intention is to maintain small production use cases as an important part of the Red Hat Developer program and the Individual Developer subscription to help bring enterprise-class Linux to more users.