Migrating from CentOS to Oracle Linux

The first question is why? Why are we talking about moving from CentOS to Oracle Linux?

Before we explain this, let’s chat a little bit about the surprise that IBM Red Hat dropped on the Linux community on December 8, 2020. CentOS as we know it is dead! It is > /dev/null.

On December 8th, 2020, CentOS (which is controlled by IBM Red Hat) announced the news: “CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end at the end of 2021.” The 2021 date is eight years earlier than planned, with 2029 being the original published date for the end of development on the CentOS 8 distribution. This means if you have CentOS 8 and you want to continue using a stable and predictable release, then you need to make a change.

The CentOS team is “shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release.” Remember Fedora, where new technology is constantly being introduced and withdrawn, where change is normal and expected? That is basically how the community looks at CentOS Stream. This one change basically destroyed the ability for enterprise system administrators to use CentOS 8 and beyond in production, and dev, test, and quality assurance (QA) environments.

So, what’s next? There are already several projects that have forked or cloned the CentOS model to replicate the effort and provide a stable distro that tracks RHEL, with a predictable release schedule and a stable organization to back up the project. A concern you should have with the multitude of projects that have started is picking the right one. You have no idea what new distros will fail or succeed. Some of these forks will take years to stabilize, and users need a solution now. As an admin, you do not need a fork or immature distribution that may change direction. You need a stable distribution that has the goal of maintaining compatibility with RHEL. Oracle Linux provides both, the proven stability and is actively investing in maintaining compatibility with RHEL though the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA.rg)

OpenELA was founded by Oracle, SUSE and CIQ, the company that is behind RockyLinux.OpenELA is a trade association that builds a compatible code base that is a drop in replacement for RHEL. This allows the open source community to combine their efforts to prove a stable replacement for CentOS.