CentOS Stream isn’t that terrible
With the announcement of CentOS Stream many users were left more than worried. Moving from a stable and free distribution, RHEL’s twin sister to a test environment, prone to errors and needing constant patches did not seem like good news. In addition, its lifecycle (that is, time during which updates are provided to each release) too short, which did not make it appropriate for most servers in production that at the time decided to install CentOS instead of RHEL for not requiring high-level technical support. This is the case for small businesses or academic institutions.
Fedora already existed, where all the new technical advances that would later arrive in Red Hat (and CentOS) are being tested. Fedora is an ideal Linux distribution for desktop environments but few companies had in production.
Finally the scenario has cleared up. Fedora will continue to have the same function within Red Hat’s Linux ecosystem, nothing changes here. CentOS Stream will be a platform that, using “continuous delivery” techniques, inherited from the devops philosophy, will become the next minor version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with a fairly short lifecycle.
Red Hat Linux is now free for small environments
However, the big news is this: for environments with up to 16 productive servers, RHEL can be installed at no cost using Developer licenses. On second thought, it makes all the sense in the world. With the exception of large super-computing (HPC) environments, you migrate from CentOS to RHEL seamlessly and at no additional cost. Not only will the features be maintained, but the latest updates will be accessed immediately.
This will be possible from February 1, 2021. Red Hat warns that it will keep the subscription system, even if they are free by trying to simplify them as much as possible. They argue legal reasons, such as that as new laws such as the GDPR come into force, the terms and conditions of your software need to be updated. That is, it is neither, nor are the licenses expected in perpetuity that IBM still maintains for example.
From our point of view this is a success in expanding the user base, but also potential future client not only of Red Hat Linux but of all its products: Satellite, Ansible, OpenShift, Openstack, Cloudforms among many others.
How do we migrate from CentOS to Red Hat?
We have a utility that performs migration, convert2rhel
• convert2rhel –disable-submgr –enablerepo < RHEL_RepoID1 > –enablerepo < RHEL_RepoID2 > –debug
Change RHEL_RepoID to the repositories you choose in for /etc/yum.repos.d/code> rhel-7-server-rpmscode> example, or rhel-8-baseoscode> rhel-8-appstreamcode> .
You can look at the options with:
Convert2rhel -h
And when you’re ready, just start the process:
Convert2rhel
In this link you have all the details