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Comment by rootbear | Hacker News Reader

I'm a NASA contractor and until recently we used CentOS a lot. With the changes made to CentOS by Red Hat, we are now moving to RHEL or Ubuntu. The Agency prefers to have an OS with official, paid support. (I do not speak for NASA, my employer, or anyone else, and I'm retiring in two weeks, so there.)

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> The Agency prefers to have an OS with official, paid support.

How did CentOS fit into that? I guess I would have naively expected you to be on RHEL to begin with.

Where I was projects started on CentOS. Often once they got big / went to production, they were switched to RHEL.

And devs often used CentOS when playing around (ie, setting up VM's etc at home or just randomly) because you didn't need to talk to anyone to do so.

AlmaLinux with paid support on demand by Cloudlinux?

In my experience CentOS basically let you get all the security benefits from RHEL with none of the costs. So it has been popular to minimize budgets.

Sure, but that's the exact opposite of having paid support, which is why I was confused

The agency tolerated CentOS but was never happy about it. The fact that it was directly derived from RHEL and could be expected to get timely security fixes probably helped make them comfortable with it. The agency is also concerned about Python2 remaining the default in both CentOS 7 and RHEL 7. Red Hat has committed to back porting security fixes for Python 2 proper, but that leaves a large universe of add on packages that might not get patched. Thus the move from both CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 to RHEL 8.

Hope you enjoy your retirement :-)

Oracle is an option (especially for converting CentOS without reinstalling), but it has become stunningly more expensive.

There used to be a $99/yr "support in name only" option, with no ability to file service requests (community discussion boards only). The basic level of support was $500/yr.

It now appears that basic support is $1,200/yr. Of course, ISO downloads and yum support are still free, but the support contract is now much more expensive.

Oracle also still offers free KSplice kernel updates for Ubuntu, but it appears that Fedora support was removed.

A couple years ago I worked for a different federal agency and RHEL was used extensively, but was being replaced with OpenShift. The base images being used were all over the map and the whole process was quite a convoluted mess.

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