Canonical has launched a campaign to promote Ubuntu as a replacement for CentOS on the servers used in the infrastructure of financial services companies. While Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS have become firmly established in the financial services industry, fundamental changes to CentOS could prompt financial companies to rethink their decisions about the operating system.
For those who do not know what has happened around the case of the Dedication taken by the Red Hat team to kill CentOS, they should know that Red Hat has plans to move from CentOS to CentOS Stream, which comes just before a new version by RHEL.
CentOS Stream will continue to serve as an upstream (development) branch from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The company adds “that at the end of CentOS Linux 8 (rebuilding RHEL 8) your best option will be to migrate to CentOS Stream 8, which is a small delta of CentOS Linux 8, and has regular updates. like traditional versions of CentOS Linux.
Red Hat’s Karsten Wade, Senior Community Architect and CentOS board member, defended the decision to phase out CentOS in favor of CentOS Stream, saying the two projects were “antithetical” and Stream is a satisfactory replacement in most cases. .
CentOS Linux is later than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while CentOS Stream is upstream, a late development version of what will soon enter RHEL (unless issues are discovered).
The initiative is driven by the decision of Red Hat to stop releasing updates for the classic CentOS 8 as of December 31, 2021 in favor of the CentOS Stream test project.
Faced with such a decision by Red Hat, many of the distributions that offer server versions did not hesitate to launch their proposal to position their distribution as an alternative to CentOS and be able to monopolize all those potential customers who do not see a future in CentOS Stream.
And in the case of Canonical it was not the exception either, since as mentioned at the beginning it recently launched its campaign to promote its distribution (Ubuntu) as an alternative to CentOS.
The financial services industry has begun exploring options for a stable and compatible open source Linux operating system following the announcement by IBM Red Hat to accelerate the end of life of CentOS 8 with no further operating system updates after December 31. of 2021.
Finservs that have been using CentOS as a stable point distribution for their servers, virtual machines and devices had migrated to CentOS 8 expecting support until 2029, only to find that their “until 2029” distribution became a “until 2021” distribution simply a few months after the update …
Canonical releases new versions of Ubuntu on a regular cadence, allowing the community, businesses and developers to plan their roadmaps with the certainty of accessing new open source capabilities. The LTS or ‘Long Term Support’ versions are released every two years in April. The LTS versions are the ‘enterprise grade’ versions of Ubuntu and are the most widely used. It is estimated that 95% of all Ubuntu installations are LTS versions.
In the post made by Canonical, we can see that some of the points mentioned In an effort to push the financial services industry to migrate from CentOS to Ubuntu are the following:
- Predictable release schedule.
- Enterprise-grade support with 10-year upgrade version, no-reboot kernel upgrade service, and SLA.
- High performance and versatility.
- The security and certification of the cryptographic stack is FIPS 140-2 Level 1.
- Suitable for use in public and private cloud systems.
- Kubernetes support. Delivered to Google GKE, Microsoft AKS, and Amazon EKS CAAS as a reference platform for Kubernetes.
Finally if you want to know more about it, you can consulate the details in the following link.
