Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc.
It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.
It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.
A slow initial release and dying on the vine are two completely separate things. There's significant overlap in time between major distro releases, and while many users of CentOS were excited about getting newer versions, it was usually not imperative and all involved would likely agree that making sure existing releases continue to have timely updates for security and other things was more important.
> It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.
Whether cloud companies or not, there are a few ways forward now that weren't really considered previously. CentOS always had a somewhat tacit agreement with Red Hat to not overtly compete with Red Hat's revenue stream. i.e. Don't sell support, if advanced help is needed refer them to Red Hat for a license and support.
I would say the relationships now are a tad more adversarial. Asking for money in more direct manners may now be more feasible. Even without that, I do think the cloud providers can easily fund one or more of these projects enough. The amount of money even one could spend to ensure the staffing of one of these projects is less than a rounding error in their operating budget, and given how often I suspect CentOS was chosen as the deployed OS in a way that makes their total cost numbers reflected back to a CTO look less, a very good investment for them.
AWS are a sponsor of Rocky Linux
So now they either have to support Rocky Linux, and hope others do to, or pay the full cost of maintaining a RHEL compatible distro.
RHEL7 is the upstream for AL2 and there is a LOT of heavy lifting done by AWS. Newer kernel, newer toolchain, newer glibc. They do live patching. They actually test all sorts of workloads before even a minor errata update. They took OpenSSL 1.0.2 through FIPS validation with NIST.
Just stop talking.
Remind me again, how long did it take RedHat to publish CentOS 8 images out to cloud providers or virtualbox? I think it was the very least 6 months behind the RedHat 8 release.
Only started using CentOS at 7, so not sure how much they used to lag behind releases beforehand.
But I've also had a dozen quality issues with RedHat software and services since they've been assimilated by IBM; so there's room for plenty of surprises.
6.0 had a 242 day delay--I never really paid attention to why, but that was a very noticeable lag compared to their previous release schedule.