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Let's poll all the web hosting companies here. How many of them still have CentOS 7 servers running? The same CentOS 7 that was released in July 2014, 9 years ago. How many servers total do they have? How many server administrators are they employing?
Why was CentOS such a popular choice for web hosting companies to use (prior to the CentOS 8 decision)?
Perhaps web hosting isn't a serious business.
@MechanicWeb is illustrating this very well. It's not so much that you're going to run the OS for 10 years, but the fact that the start date doesn't start the moment that OS version is released. The web hosting industry doesn't stop adding new servers to their portfolio because they're mid-cycle in an OS release schedule.
I would have to go back through and study server receipts, but just a gut feeling, we probably keep servers on average about 6 to 8 years. Still more than 5 years. But we still need that 4 year buffer because practically all of those servers did not come online when the moment their OS was released. CentOS 7 is an exception here because the decision by IBM/RHEL to move CentOS 8 upstream created a lot of havoc with where to move to next.
Congrats if you've never had to work in an industry where the margins are short and you don't have to worry about customer's content that you can't specifically vouch for. I'm sure that makes upgrading everything smooth.
Again, low end webhosting is not enterprise level. They do not buy expensive support contracts, and that is what is keeping RHEL alive.
But do a poll and also ask how many of them pay for support contracts, it would be interesting to know.
Because it was free.
Sure it is, but it's not enterprise level. At least most of it, very few webhosts are big enough to actually call themselves enterprises, and I would imagine even fewer spends big money on RHEL. Webhosting has never been a big market for RHEL.
But again, webhosting is not enterprise. When you talk about enterprise, you are talking business that buy 1000 servers just to replace the 1000 servers they have that are 3 years old. Webhosts don't do that.
But again, low end webhosting is not what pays the salaries for 19.000 RHEL employees. The entire low end industry is not even a rounding error in RHEL books. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but you do not even exist in the world of RHEL so how long you run your servers or how often you upgrade software is completely irrelevant.
When you spend millions each year paying for RHEL's stability and longevity, then they might listen. As long as you run free software that costs them millions each year to give away for free, your opinion will not matter to them.
I've been in hosting for over 30 years, I started my first ISP when we ran 9600 baud modems over PSTN and my first webhosting was running on Sun Netra servers so believe me, I've worked in all kinds of industries.
And seriously, you think enterprise level means that you do not have to worry about the content? My last enterprise level customer where I did a life cycle upgrade was a hospital, what do you think happens if they lose all the data?
(From https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/announcing-4-years-extended-life-cycle-support-els-red-hat-enterprise-linux-7 )
Presumably, Red Hat think that there are enough companies who are ready to pay for this
ELS is extremely limited and expensive as fuck. They provide "selected urgent priority bug fixes" and "certain Red Hat-defined security fixes". The chances of finding a bug in a 10 year old release is pretty slim, and a security fix might not even be a patch, they could actually tell you to run something else. The amount of customers that use this is minimal, and they will have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for it.
RHEL usually have 5 years of full support, ~3 years of maintenance support and then 2 years of extended life phase. No serious enterprise runs it without full support.
Don't get me wrong, I dislike RHEL's move as much as anyone else, but I understand why they do it. Red Hat is a company, not a charity. Spending millions on keeping freeloaders happy is not a sane business strategy when you try to convince your enterprise customers to pay top dollars for basically the same software.
Depends how you define serious I guess.
I work for a major European bank with global presence, and we still run servers on RHEL6 (though most are now on to 7), and this also applies to the exchanges we are connected to as well. I have no idea how much we spend per year on feed to Redhat as that's above my paygrade, but we have thousands of servers in place connected to most large stock exchanges in Europe, US and Asia. The situation is the same all over. I don't know if you consider banking serious enterprise, but I would, and we get full support on all systems still..
Personally though I do find it slightly scary but this is how slow some enterprises move.
If you spend millions on paying for support for legacy software, I guess that would qualify you as serious. It is not what I would recommend, but that's your choice. Organizations like yours is the reason why RHEL can charge absurd amounts of money for things like ELS.
Enterprise is different when compared to LET hosts, the company my dad works at, they pay a fortune for mysql/oracle sql/oracle linux and RHEL. They replace servers and disks every 3 years and old disk and hardware is auctioned off. Yet their PC's run WinXP(35% has now been migrated to Mac's and W11's). Old is still there and working, I think a really old server there runs oracle linux 6, which is used for development I think.
They still run 10G btw, latest is 23c i think.
my dad used to rock his firefox 27 in his winxp machine in office 4 years ago... and the server used to rock an unknown sun solaris edition and a shit old mail server on a resi ip.
There's companies out there, still running software thats outdated with ELS, and 10year releases and very needed for them.
Alibaba Linux:Oh fuck!
This article from a Percona MySQL employee https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/07/15/almalinux-makes-its-choice-the-friendly-fork/. He draws parallels in how MariaDB and Percona handles diverging from Oracle MySQL for their unique offerings that differentiate themselves from Oracle MySQL. That's how I see AlmaLinux's future
I enjoyed their whole clone wars series:
https://dissociatedpress.net/category/clone-wars/
I use RHEL every day at work, but I haven't run a RHEL-ecosystem box myself in years since accepting Debian as my saviour.
Maybe I'll try one.
I read the other day who said that the RHCE certification now is 75% Ansible questions.
Meanwhile Canonical is busy pushing scary CVE messages when using
Maybe related to their 2023 IPO
apt upgradeto make users register and upgrade to Ubuntu Pro via snapDebian is the only hope left. If it dies, have to start reading FreeBSD handbook
AlmaLinux are going to aim for ABI Compadability.
https://itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/rhel-clone-almalinux-says-it-will-now-aim-for-abi-compatibility.html
CIQ, Oracle and SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association for a Collaborative and Open Future