CentOS for server

[paulober]

Hi LTT community,

 

Does anyone here have some idea/experience of/with CentOS as an OS for servers? And I would be interested why so many professional server systems run with CentOS although it was by far not as known to me as e.g. Debian 11 as a server os? Do I have any benefits from getting into CentOS now and switching my servers to it?

 

[Guest]

21 minutes ago, paulober said:

And I would be interested why so many professional server systems run with CentOS

Probably because it's basically a free version of RHEL.

 

21 minutes ago, paulober said:

Do I have any benefits from getting into CentOS now and switching my servers to it?

Does Debian fulfill your needs?

Does CentOS have something you specifically need, but can't obtain in a reliable way on Debian?

 

I mean unless you have a specific reason to switch, there is really no need to.

I personally Run Arch Linux on our servers in a production environment, it's stable and fits my needs.

[tikker]

Support and stability (i.e. they don't update quickly). Basically a free version of RHEL.

 

 

Having your nodes updated with the latest and greatest, constantly breaking everything is a pain in the ass.

[paulober]

Ok thank you for the feadback.

Yes, I am actually quite happy with my Debian 11 servers. I've just noticed lately that when I select an app as the image for the server setup (like Nextcloud, Wordpress, Redmine, etc...), my hosting provider always uses CentOS 8 as the base in the background. And in a LTT PETABYTE video I just noticed, they also have CentOS on their server initially. That's why I was a bit confused if maybe a move to CentOS would be worth considering.

 

[MrXeno]

On 1/30/2022 at 12:21 AM, paulober said:

Ok thank you for the feadback.

Yes, I am actually quite happy with my Debian 11 servers. I've just noticed lately that when I select an app as the image for the server setup (like Nextcloud, Wordpress, Redmine, etc...), my hosting provider always uses CentOS 8 as the base in the background. And in a LTT PETABYTE video I just noticed, they also have CentOS on their server initially. That's why I was a bit confused if maybe a move to CentOS would be worth considering.

 

I have mostly used CentOS for my server as that is what I am most used to working with. At home, it's ubuntu Server LTS as it works fine. If you need 101% up time something like Debian stable, RedHat etc is an excellent choice. 

If you work with a larger number of servers then something like arch is rarely a viable choice because of how much more work, there is in it compared to Debian and RedHat.

 

This is just my take on it. I use whatever fits the need I have.

[Alexeygridnev1993]

Please keep in mind that CentOS will soon be released as "CentOS Stream", which will be something similar to Debian Unstable. This is done, of course, to push more people to paid RHEL as many clients need a rock solid system which never fails. So, consider other options like Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS.

[10leej]

4 hours ago, Alexeygridnev1993 said:

Please keep in mind that CentOS will soon be released as "CentOS Stream", which will be something similar to Debian Unstable. This is done, of course, to push more people to paid RHEL as many clients need a rock solid system which never fails. So, consider other options like Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS.

Your horribly misinformed here. CentOS Stream is downstream from fedora just ahead of RHEL (which now has a free tier btw). And Stream has been a released thing for a couple of years now. It's perfectly fine and stable for home server use, and could even be argued it's fine for enterprise use as well.

[Alexeygridnev1993]

On 2/2/2022 at 6:57 PM, 10leej said:

Your horribly misinformed here. CentOS Stream is downstream from fedora just ahead of RHEL (which now has a free tier btw). And Stream has been a released thing for a couple of years now. It's perfectly fine and stable for home server use, and could even be argued it's fine for enterprise use as well.

I have no first-hand experience with CentOS but I've seen a lot of articles and YouTube videos which found this move pretty scandalous. And Canonical immediately put the guides for migrating from CentOS on their website - I would assume, that's for a reason (in a sense that there is a reason this kind of marketing may work).

[Vojtech Trefny]

CentOS Stream is what will be the next minor release of RHEL. So if the latest RHEL 8 release is now 8.5, CentOS 8 Stream is what will be released as RHEL 8.6 in a couple of months. CentOS Stream is also a rolling release so it doesn't have minor releases and when RHEL 8.6 is released, C8S will already receive updates that will be part of RHEL 8.7. So in theory it is "less" stable than RHEL, but still with all the update limits and API stability promises of RHEL. When comparing to Debian or Ubuntu it's like getting updates for your Debian Stable or Ubuntu LTS a little bit sooner and not like running Debian Testing or Unstable.

 

The biggest difference between (now discontinued) CentOS 8 and CentOS 8 Stream is that instead of getting the RHEL minor release few months after its release (because rebranding and rebuilding it as CentOS takes some time) you'll get the RHEL minor release few months sooner.

[M9_Shyamalan]

On 2/4/2022 at 5:20 PM, Alexeygridnev1993 said:

I have no first-hand experience with CentOS but I've seen a lot of articles and YouTube videos which found this move pretty scandalous. And Canonical immediately put the guides for migrating from CentOS on their website - I would assume, that's for a reason (in a sense that there is a reason this kind of marketing may work).

This move was not well received by the community. CentOS had become the de facto free enterprise server OS. It was basically Redhat, without the price tag.

The move to stream basically meant that updates would be less thoroughly tested and pushed more regularly, so people running CentOS for the stability were essentially just going to become beta testers for RHEL. If you were running a production workload on hundreds of servers, this was far from ideal.

Since then, I have actually heard good things about stream, but the fact is CentOS stream just represents too big of a risk for large production deployments.

Currently I believe the majority of CentOS stable users have moved to one of:

• Rocky Linux - A fork of CentOS/RHEL by the original CentOS creators, aiming to continue where CentOS8 left off
• AlmaLinux - A similar project spearheaded by web hosting OS developer CloudLinux
• RHEL free - Free Redhat for up to 16 servers
• Ubuntu LTS - Canonical's server Linux offering
• Debian (lol)

[10leej]

8 hours ago, M9_Shyamalan said:

This move was not well received by the community. CentOS had become the de facto free enterprise server OS. It was basically Redhat, without the price tag.

The move to stream basically meant that updates would be less thoroughly tested and pushed more regularly, so people running CentOS for the stability were essentially just going to become beta testers for RHEL. If you were running a production workload on hundreds of servers, this was far from ideal.

Since then, I have actually heard good things about stream, but the fact is CentOS stream just represents too big of a risk for large production deployments.

Currently I believe the majority of CentOS stable users have moved to one of:

• Rocky Linux - A fork of CentOS/RHEL by the original CentOS creators, aiming to continue where CentOS8 left off
• AlmaLinux - A similar project spearheaded by web hosting OS developer CloudLinux
• RHEL free - Free Redhat for up to 16 servers
• Ubuntu LTS - Canonical's server Linux offering
• Debian (lol)

Honestly what did you expect? Redhat owns CentOS and they were developing a free version of their same product. While no one really contributed back to CentOS in the first place.