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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

I've always found the relationship between RHEL and CentOS to be a bit odd. Ignoring the technology side of things, where I prefer some of the RHEL philosophy, using Ubuntu to gain the option of paid support makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?

How would I switch from being a CentOS shop to a RHEL shop if I all of a sudden find myself needing support?

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I believe you can switch your yum (or dnf) repository to point to a Red Hat source, then use yum to reinstall all your packages from the RHEL equivalent. There's a couple tutorials out there for it, and once finished your system will look indistinguishable from the RHEL version.

Of course, if you are running your systems using modern devops design principles, then you can redeploy your infrastructure based on RHEL repositories instead of CentOS.

I don’t get why anyone would use CentOS if they didn’t have to for some reason. I can understand using Redhat for “company” reasons, but why restrict yourself by running CentOS if you don’t have a real reason to?

I would be inclined to see it the other way around. In most of the places where I have worked, there are enough people to provide support and build custom packages for the CentOS that paid Red Hat support makes little sense.

As to why you would use it vs other Linux distributions? It's well supported by commercial software, server hardware, and there's a large pool of people with Red Hat certification which is directly applicable to CentOS. It's also pretty mature and not prone to sudden changes.

I would imagine that most RHEL customers are to be found in more conservative sectors of business, but that could just be my personal biases :)

Exasol loves CentOS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exasol

Let me show you how much they love CentOS:

http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_result_detail.asp?id=11...

Exasol and CentOS are alone in TPC-H database performance. There is no other competitive player.

So they charge for their software but deploy it on centos instead of rhel?

Yes, they do, and their TPC-H scores cannot be beaten. CentOS seems a reasonable choice, and likely drives down the TCO.

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