The “stream” of development in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem has been Fedora > RHEL > CentOS, but Red Hat is changing things up:
The CentOS Stream project sits between the Fedora Project and RHEL in the RHEL Development process, providing a “rolling preview” of future RHEL kernels and features. This enables developers to stay one or two steps ahead of what’s coming in RHEL, which was not previously possible with traditional CentOS releases.
This is a really big deal and probably to big a change for our company and others to react to in such a short space of time.
In barely a release we have to decide to pay for red hat or find an alternative to centos for production systems as it’s no longer LTS.
No, they aren’t getting rid of the existing CentOS Linux which is just a whitebranded RHEL. They are instead adding something conceptually between Fedora and RHEL
This was the old pattern
Fedora => RHEL => CENTOS
This is the new pattern
Fedora => Centos Streaming => RHEL => CENTOS Linus
The new Centos streaming is basically a rolling release like a Fedora rawhide but for RHEL. It will start off its life as essentially the old CENTOS, but will have new features added to it and eventually the new RHEL will branch off of it.
Yeah the naming sucks sucks sucks sucks.
So.. from what I thought I’d read was that RHEL has a ‘App Stream’ for 8.x. Which basically means that instead of them releasing 8.x, and then you’re almost forever stuck with (for example) php7.1, you can then instead through the App Stream, choose to install 8.x of php whenever it comes out. But the core OS stays the same.
I think that’s actually what CentOS 8.0 Stream is.
https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2018/11/15/rhel8-introducing-appstreams/
Yes and no.
You are correct that this is the current state. However, I’ve spoken to our Redhat Rep and Rehat have NOT committed to CentOS continuing in future releases and that come redhat 9, there will only be the 3 steps. They will honour current support cycles though for 7 and 8
That means from 9, the future will be;
Fedora – Centos – redhat.
It’s basically a direct reaction to Oracle linux and Amazon Linux rebranding CentOS and more importantly taking advantage of their patching and compatibility benefits.
From 9 on, if Amazon want to back port Redhat security patches, they have to do so themselves. And because the code is released after the patch in many cases, Amazon and Oracle will now effectively have a delay in security compared to RH.
Interesting, CentOS already has a delay from RH. Wonder if this was a long time coming, or a result of their new IBM overlords.
I think this was the plan from the start when RH brought CentOS into the fold. They explicitly mentioned they wanted CentOS to be a test bed for next generation technology, and they weren’t happy how Ubuntu had become the bedrock distro for cloud computing. (They were really, really salty about this.) You could also see this in some of the tech they started testing out with RHEL/CentOS 7. SCL was an effort to add new libs and applications plus a CentOS Continuous Release repo showed up.
RHEL became a much more agile distro with AppStreams in response to people complaining about RHEL/CentOS releases shipping “outdated” software and picking Ubuntu with their 3 year LTS cycle.
It all makes sense how this is coming together. RH needed something to QA their new packages before adding them to RHEL. Originally, Fedora was supposed to be the platform for QA and bug fixing, but the community decided they would rather add features then fix bugs. 🙂 People were also complaining that Fedora moves too fast since they push out new versions as soon as they are ready possibly breaking code, and as such, there was a need for a middle distro that focuses on bug fixes and stability with a faster release cycle.
Ok, from the horses mouth. Can’t argue with that. Damn…
Back in the Fedora early days, Red Hat marketing was actively throwing FUD to scare people from using Fedora professionally, so I would take that with a grain of salt.
On the other hand, it they discontinue the LTS CentOS, is very likely someone will step-up and provide a new rebuild (revive Scientific Linux or something like that) and the situation goes back to square one.
@nicubunu If that was their intention, they are dumber than rocks. My reaction to that news is not “Ok I’ll pay up for redhat”, but ok that gives me the ammunition I need to switch to Ubuntu. Who’s release cadence is better and not owned and controlled by IBM.
@nicubunu in our specific case we are a no for profit, so the cost is nominal for us in the grand scheme thanks to Very generous discounts Redhat offer.
We previously standardized on CentOS for all our non-prod and VMs with Redhat used for live (basically only paying to support the systems we wanted supported). Over time those lines blurred (and AWS linux snuck in there too).
In practical terms, our CentOS(non-prod) machines always ran a bit ahead of the live Redhat ones so we could test in advance, if anything breaks (looking at you CentOS 7.7 systemd changes….). Redhat’s new model actual does that in a more “natural” way for how we operate.
Wow. People seem to be really confused about this.
Today CentOS released CentOS 8. It’s RHEL8 rebuilt. When RH release RHEL 8.1, CentOS will release 8.1.
They also released CentOS Stream. This is to be a rolling RHEL release.
From what I read, I think this is like adding the “testing” ppa to Ubuntu LTS (and maybe the HWE stacks? TBD?)
So I just installed it on a test laptop today. At the moment, it’s just CentOS 8. Over time, it will diverge with packages that will become CentOS 8.1 and give developers/systems folks like me more time to test the next stable release of CentOS 8.x.
This seems great to me. It ought to take a lot of the guesswork and nerves of patching and updating. I can run CentOS Stream on testing/dev machines while keeping important production servers on CentOS 8 proper.
What isn’t clear to me is what happens when RH starts working in earnest on RHEL9. Will CentOS Stream shift to that? At what stage? I suspect this will be determined later. Who knows, maybe this is a way for RH to test shifting to rolling releases instead of essentially freezing and hardening Fedora releases years before the next stable RHEL. This is sort of what Microsoft has done with Windows and Oracle has done with Solaris (which is essentially in maintenance mode until 2034 now.)
AppStreams looks to me like something completely different with a frustratingly similar name. A cursory reading of it sounds to me like it’s certified PPAs for RHEL. (So you can add a new AppStream to get a new version of a key component, similar to how I would add newer PHP PPAs to give older Ubuntu LTS releases current versions of PHP.)
At least that’s how I read all of this.
I’m happy to see CentOS 8. 7 is getting pretty long in the tooth and when I tested RHEL8 on release, the nice-to-haves like epel weren’t even up and running yet. Day 1 of CentOS 8 is already feeling like a great, solid base to build cool stuff on.
Uh oh. Replying to myself.
ZDNet has a good overview of CentOS Stream with excerpts from an interview with Red Hat’s CTO.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-introduces-rolling-release-centos-stream/
Looks like it’s a proper rolling release; not just CentOS Testing.
Cool. I’d rather this than Fedora on my various machines.
Cool, okay, I got the AppStream part right. Hearing of a Rolling Release version of CentOS kind of hurts my brain, since it’s what you use when you don’t want a lot of changes. I installed it as well in a VM, and the only update as of yesterday when I did it, was to glibc. I did find it amusing that CentOS 8’s DVD image was 8.0GB.
AppStreams have nothing to do with CentOS Stream. 🙂 They decouple the libraries and applications from the base system. It’s more like how the BSDs break things up between base and ports.