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New no-cost, low-cost, and simplified RHEL accessĪs 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.
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.Īlthough 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. CentOS Stream is the continuously delivered platform that becomes the next minor version of RHEL. 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. To summarize: we're making CentOS Stream the collaboration hub for RHEL, with the landscape looking like this: This week, Red Hat clarifies the broad strokes as follows: 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. Red Hat's early termination of CentOS 8 in 2021 cut eight of those 10 years away, leaving thousands of users stranded. 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. Further Reading CentOS Linux is dead-and Red Hat says Stream is “not a replacement”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.