Vishal Ghariwala, senior director and chief technology officer for SUSE in the Asia-Pacific region, told iTWire in response to queries that the company had an offering known as SUSE Liberty Linux to cope with the EOL of CentOS 7.
"When we speak to CIOs and IT directors, we hear that they need an easy way to keep existing systems supported, so workloads continue to run," he said.
"They admit that multi-Linux is a reality. They’re looking for a trusted partner that supports their choice of Linux operating system, and need solutions that simplify IT operations to focus on business needs."
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AlmaLinux, another distribution that came to prominence in the wake of Red Hat's decision to make source code for its enterprise Linux available only to its paying customers, has devised a solution to allow people running CentOS 6 to migrate to AlmaLinux.
The need to look for replacements for CentOS arose because of Red Hat's restrictive moves. Red Hat acquired CentOS in 2014, but then shut it down in December 2020. CentOS is basically Red Hat's Enterprise Linux without the trademarks.
In June 2023, Red Hat, which is owned by IBM which bought it in 2019, tightened its grip on RHEL source code, and said it would make source code available only to its paying customers.
After that, enterprise distributions like AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux have presented themselves as alternatives to CentOS. Plus, SUSE has said it would invest more than US$10 million (A$15.1 million) to fork the publicly available RHEL source code and make it available to world+dog with no restrictions.
"SUSE Liberty Linux is a technology and support solution that lets you keep your current operating system while getting the support, maintenance updates, and security patches you need for your existing Linux estates without the need to migrate," Ghariwala pointed out.
"And I'd like to say that again - 'you don't need to perform any migration'. You simply switch to SUSE Liberty Linux. It's like switching from one telco to another telco where there is absolutely no impact on your mobile number."
Red Hat's June 2023 announcement that a new line of development, CentOS Stream, would be started, focused attention on the fact that this new line would be the only way to obtain RHEL source code. However, it would predate RHEL releases and thus forever be out of date.
Red Hat's community distribution, Fedora, is upstream to CentOS Stream, making its source even older.
Ghariwala said one customer in APAC who had opted for SUSE Liberty Linux, and demonstrated how it could save costs and support resiliency, was Tyro Payments in Australia.
"As Tyro was expanding their infrastructure, it was a key requirement that they were able to incorporate a strong level of resiliency within their business and technology stack," he explained.
"Tyro also needed to expand its infrastructure to handle a rising volume of transactions, to ensure that the integration between point-of-sale and payment transacting remained direct and seamless. SUSE Liberty Linux offered them that flexibility as well as strong support.
"Adopting SUSE Liberty Linux further resulted in an immediate 50% saving in total subscription costs for Tyro. With SUSE Manager on top of Liberty Linux, Tyro also saves time and effort in patch management and reporting, which the team can then reinvest in adding value to their core business of payments processing.
"Overall, as we’ve mentioned before and continue to reinforce, SUSE Liberty Linux is also SUSE’s commitment to 'open'. Liberty Linux, and our US$10 million (A$15.1 million) continued investment in maintaining it, is focused on upholding open choice in the market and lack of vendor lock-in."
Asked whether SUSE had any plans to try and lure businesses running CentOS 7 to switch to SUSE, Ghariwala replied: "In my conversations with CIOs, I hear that uncertainty, keeping workloads running, and support as well as security are top-of-mind concerns.
"For customers impacted by the end-of-life of CentOS, our top priority is to provide them with true choice. Customers are looking for a trusted partner that supports their choice of Linux operating system, and simplifies their operations.
"Such customers are typically hoping to buy some time so they can make a well thought out decision for their business. Customers also want to simplify their operations so they can continue to support, maintain, and secure their Linux distributions. In addition, they would like to continuously patch their systems to keep them healthy and secure. After all, unpatched vulnerabilities are a common cause of security breaches.
"With SUSE Liberty Linux, users also will receive fully application binary compatible security patches and maintenance updates for their entire Linux estate. This keeps infrastructure up-to-date and secure, ensuring high availability, resilient storage, and bulletproof load balancing.
"SUSE Liberty Linux customers also get enterprise support and predictable releases for a multi-distro world, from a trusted partner who understands Linux and the value of open source."
He said he could not comment on plans being created by Rocky Linux. "However as CIQ [the parent body of Rocky Linux] is a part of the OpenELA effort, I can talk more from that perspective," Ghariwala added.
"The OpenELA as a whole continues to explore ways to ensure openness, transparency and flexibility, all of which remain core tenets of the enterprise open source ecosystem, so that businesses and users of that software can all benefit.
"OpenELA is committed to always acting in the best interests of the open source community and all downstream derivatives and to create an inclusive community of organisations and individuals to ensure the longevity, stability, and management of this project."
