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

jureve

Last month, Red Hat caused a lot of consternation in the enthusiast and small business Linux world when it announced the discontinuation of CentOS Linux.

Long-standing tradition—and ambiguity in Red Hat's posted terms—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 cut eight of those 10 years away, leaving thousands of users stranded.
CentOS Stream

Red Hat's December announcement of CentOS Stream—which it initially billed 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 broad strokes as follows:
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To summarize: we're making CentOS Stream the collaboration hub for RHEL, with the landscape looking like this:

• Fedora Linux is the place for major new operating system innovations, thoughts, and ideas—essentially, this is where the next major version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is 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 nearly every industry in the world, from cloud-scale deployments in mission-critical data centers and localized server rooms to public clouds and out to far-flung edges of enterprise networks.

Although CentOS Stream could be considered appropriate and perfectly adequate for enthusiasts and home-labbers, the lack of a long, well-defined life cycle made it inappropriate for most production use and, especially, production use by shops that chose a RHEL-compatible distribution in the first place.

New no-cost, low-cost, and simplified RHEL access

As of February 1, 2021, Red Hat will make RHEL available at no cost for small-production workloads—with "small" defined as 16 systems or fewer. This access to no-cost production RHEL is by way of the newly expanded Red Hat Developer Subscription program, and it comes with no strings—in Red Hat's words, "this isn't a sales program, and no sales representative will follow up."

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

Considering the previous public outrage about CentOS 8's early demise, we reached out to Red Hat for clarification regarding availability guarantees—specifically, whether any guarantee was given that the terms of the free small-production use will stay valid for the length of general support for the RHEL version they cover. After some deliberation, this was the official answer:

A Red Hat subscription gives you access to all available versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux except for those in extended support. This access ends when the subscription ends, as does access to all related documentation, support, services, patches, etc., so it’s important to think about the subscription separately from the platform.

The Red Hat Developer program isn't a fly-by-night or quickly-produced program; it has existed since early 2015 with multi-system deployments supported from 2018. The big change today is that now a small number of production systems can now be included under the subscription for individuals, but the program itself is tried and true. We've never removed anything from the program, only added to it, highlighted by today's announcement.

The Individual Developer subscription is currently set up as a one year subscription. Renewals will be a simple process as close to "clicking a button" as possible. We have no intent to end this program and we’ve set it up to be sustainable—we want to keep giving the users that want to use RHEL access to it. The primary reason we need a subscription term is because it is legally difficult to offer unlimited terms globally and as new laws come into effect, for example 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 in perpetuity.

Our intent 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-grade Linux to more users.

Source: CentOS is gone—but RHEL is now free for up to 16 production servers

InceptionHosting

I dunno, feels kind of like offering a man that died of starvation a meal at this point.

VPN

Now they start fearing of their own decisions.

Janevski

No no, CentOS is gone. This story is finished. No backsies.

elliotc

Centos only if I need Centos6, for newer OS, Debian/Ubuntu

gks

Doesn't make sense, Long Live Debian/Ubuntu. However the enterprise customers heavily rely on RHEL, having 16 production server is still a lot for small and medium businesses.

havoc

SGraf

@gks said:
Doesn't make sense, Long Live Debian/Ubuntu. However the enterprise customers heavily rely on RHEL, having 16 production server is still a lot for small and medium businesses.

actually its not as much as you'd think.

It also adds an extra step to deploying a new server,...

jarland

To be honest I'm not opposed to even paying for RHEL, for profitable production servers. What I am reluctant to do is put my faith and money behind a company that violated the sacred bond of LTS on a distro that they were well aware runs the world.

I'm also not on board with adopting a fork made by anyone with ownership ties to cPanel. Wasn't cloudlinux acquired by them or am I remembering wrong?

yokowasis

How do they track my servers count ? with some kind of key ? can I move the key to another server ?

gks

@yokowasis said:
How do they track my servers count ? with some kind of key ? can I move the key to another server ?

For RHEL, you need activation with their service before installing any tools with yum or upgrades all solely behind them.
16 server limit is really awesome, but as @jarland expressed, they did a planned murder of hopes of 100s of thousands developers, their time around the eco-systems. We have spent more than 8000 man hours with CentOS. It is Cent OS enabled more businesses, as we remember, we helped to at least 20 plus companies [in past] to use RHEL subscription, just because our developers were trained well in CentOS, it was easy, the fat wallet clients who concerns about Linux security, opt in for RHEL.

I see Ubuntu with firewall, minimal strip down version with control over packages and vigilance can be used, in my experience, as many analytics companies use Ubuntu distribution in AWS/Cloud, it is easy for small and medium companies to move forward with other eco-systems.

I am sure, we will have customers with RHEL subscription,also who wants cost optimised solutions [ubuntu/free RHEL], but our ecosystem now shall be dividing one with Ubuntu and one with RHEL, twice the effort.

mobile

@havoc said:

haha. just wait until everyone get bonked harder than what oracle did

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can't you just slap selinux to debian stable and call it a day?. also most of stuff are inside container these days

havoc

@mobile said: can't you just slap selinux to debian stable and call it a day?. also most of stuff are inside container these days

Unless I'm mistaken debian comes with apparmour...so you'd need to chuck that out before adding selinux.

Containers, yes but not ideal for security. You need to VM it for that.

Neoon