

On the other hand, it also meant that CentOS was no longer an independent platform. This was largely positive for the rest of the world because it gave the CentOS team far more development resources than it had previously. When Red Hat took control of CentOS in 2014, it was because CentOS was closely tied to their corporate interests. The Potential of a New, Community-Driven Linux

If you run workloads that require Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) or Center for Internet Security (CIS) certification, you may have to wait longer for Rocky Linux to become an option. If you are lacking the resources to test with or are looking to use Rocky Linux in a production environment, we suggest keeping an eye on Rocky Linux as it works its way towards a more stable release in the coming months. If you are in the first group, using CentOS for a development or test environment, and you have the resources available, you can start exploring Rocky Linux now. (That meant these teams only paid for RHEL on their production environments.) Even still, thousands of other organizations were using CentOS in their production environment. We saw it most often as a budget-friendly alternative RHEL in development and testing environments. But what does that mean for users?įor most users, it is an exciting – if not yet practical – step in the right direction. Fast forward four months, and the first release of Rocky Linux is here, and we are actively testing it in our lab. Not long after that announcement the founder of CentOS Gregory Kurtzer announced Rocky Linux, a new, community-driven alternative to CentOS.

This means it is less a free version of RHEL and more of a beta version of future RHEL releases. Further, it has shifted from a downstream, bug-for-bug compatible version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to an upstream, experimental distro. Red Hat announced CentOS Stream, which they are calling “the upstream brand of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.” This version of CentOS does not operate on a traditional release schedule but in a rolling-release style, which limits its practical applications. This was a big deal for HPC practitioners and the larger computing community. Since 1987 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Themīack in December of 2020 Red Hat announced it will no longer be supporting CentOS 8 as of January 1 st, 2022 .
