What Happened To CentOS And What You Should Do

What is CentOS?

The Linux distribution CentOS is an official fork of RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Because it’s community-driven, it has always been popular among developers who liked the stability and mandate of enterprise-class software without paying for it. After RedHat announced that they would be ending their support for CentOS 8 and instead focusing on their own built in stream version, this left everyone involved in an uncomfortable situation.

A Little History

The history of CentOS is that it started in 2004, and from early on each release of the commercial product Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) used to create a corresponding version of CentOS. The availability of open source CentOS Linux meant that anyone could rapidly install a free version of CentOS for any use, including development and production applications.

What Happened to CentOS?

The CentOS project has announced that their long term support will end as of 2020. We are past that time now. This means that users can no longer receive full updates

for the CentOS 7 operating system, now users will receive only maintenance updates. CentOS 8 will not receive any updates anymore as of December 21st, 2021.

CentOS was originally created as a free and open source alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is based on the same codebase and is compatible with most Red Hat software. Many businesses choose CentOS for their servers because it is a stable and reliable platform. The end of long term support may cause some businesses to reconsider using CentOS in the future.

Cutting it shorter, it means that RedHat has decided to focus their energy on their other project, which is CentOS Stream (read further below) instead of working on keeping CentOS stable for production. Essentially, this means they are ending CentOS and it can no longer be used as a production environment.

What Was It Like Before The Announcement?

Before RedHat announced the end of life for CentOS as we know it, we had a cycle of rolling releases. What does it mean, actually? It means that before the announcment, RedHat Enterprise Linux is developed from Fedora through CentOS Stream. So, RHEL was developed from the upstream – Fedora, and then RHEL downstreamed to CentOS as we knew it.

Now, the situation is a little bit different. The main and most crucial difference is that now CentOS is becoming CentOS Stream, which is a development area, that is designed to develop and test new features for RHEL.

If you understand this right, your mind should scream a big no when you think of setting up CentOS Stream as your production operating system. If you are further intersted in this, then read more about it below.

What Should You Do?

If you’re using CentOS, you need to be aware that your system has reached its end of life. That means that there will be no more security updates or support for the operating system. So what should you do? The best option is to switch to a different operating system, and the sooner the better. But if you can’t or don’t want to do that, you can continue using CentOS, but you’ll need to be extra careful about security. Be sure to keep your software up to date and run a good antivirus program. Personally, we would advise you to move to a new and supported operating system.

What Are Your Options?

If you’re running CentOS 7, you may be wondering what your options for when it will reach its end of life. You can either switch to a different Linux distribution, or you can continue using CentOS 7 but without support or security updates. If you choose to stay with CentOS 7, you should take some steps to protect your system.

However, we do not recommend staying in an unsupported system. You have options to keep up your work without moving to RedHat Enterprise Linux, and we’re here to lay them out for you.

The cPanel Option

If you choose to move forward to a new and supported operating system, you should know your options. If you are using cPanel at the moment, we would recommend an operating system that is backed and recommended by cPanel, which is AlmaLinux.

AlmaLinux is a community-driven project that picks up where CentOS left off. It is fully compatible with all of the existing CentOS software and infrastructure. AlmaLinux also offers Long Term Support for users who need stability and security. Bonus fact for cPanel/WHM administrators – It is backed by cPanel, and if you need to migrate from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux 8, you’re in luck because cPanel has released a documentation to help you with that. If you’re not a cPanel user and you still like AlmaLinux, you can also migrate from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux 8 easily enough with their migration guide. I know I did with my own production (Yes, the one hosting this site).

The Non-cPanel Option

Mainly, there are many alternatives to replace CentOS’s job as an operating system. We’re here to give you the most voted, backed and stable. For those of you who are not using cPanel, you can use Rocky Linux.

Rocky Linux is a CentOS alternative that has been gaining traction lately. It was created in response to the end of life for CentOS. It was founded by Gregory Kurtzer, who was also the co-founder of CentOS. Rocky Linux aims to be binary compatible with CentOS so that users can easily transition to it. So far, Rocky Linux has been well-received by users and developers alike. Similarly to AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux also has its fare share of backers, between them you’ll find Google Cloud, arm, vmware, Microsoft Azure and many more.

The CentOS Stream Option

If you need to consider your options for a production environment, skip this part.

CentOS Stream is a new distribution that is used as a development platform for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is based on Fedora, but with some modifications. CentOS Stream is designed to be used by developers who want to test new features before they are integrated into RHEL. It is also useful for users who want to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the Linux world.

Wrapping Up

The end of life for CentOS 7 is approaching. In January 2024, support for the operating system will officially end. That means that users will no longer receive security updates or patches. For those who rely on CentOS for their servers, this can be a major problem. Thankfully, there are a few options available. One is to upgrade to a newer version of CentOS, such as CentOS Stream. Another is to switch to a different Linux distribution altogether. The important thing is to plan ahead and make sure your servers are still supported after January 2024.

Understanding Redis High Availability

Introduction

There are a lot of databases that you see on your day to day life, but not all have the same features and functions. One database that is particular to this article is Redis which has been in existence for over 5 years. With it’s built in caching functionalities, Redis doesn’t need as much time to complete as many other databases do. With that said, today we will be discussing about Redis Sentinel with High Availability and how useful it can be for managing private data of millions of users out there.

What is Redis?

Redis is an open source database that is often used for data caching and message queuing. It is known for its high performance and scalability. Redis Sentinel is a high availability solution for Redis. It provides failover and automatic failover in the event of a failure or outage.

What is Redis Sentinel?

Redis Sentinel is a high availability solution for Redis. It provides a mechanism for monitoring, discovering and failover for Redis instances.

Sentinel also recently gained the ability to automatically promote slaves to masters if needed, making the failover process completely automatic. This is a very important feature, as it reduces the time needed to recover from a failure and eliminates any potential for human error.

Overall, Sentinel is a very robust solution that can help keep your Redis instance up and running even in the face of failures.

What Does a High Availability Installation Do?

Installing Redis in a high availability configuration is pretty simple. All you need is to have two or more instances of Redis running on different nodes. The nodes can be physical or virtual machines. Redis Sentinel is a monitoring and failover tool that comes with Redis. It is designed to work with Redis in a high availability setup.

Redis Sentinel monitors the health of your Redis instances and automatically fails over to a standby instance if the primary instance goes down. This way, your data is always available and accessible even if one of the servers goes down.

There are a few things to keep in mind when setting up Redis in a high availability configuration. First, make sure that each instance has its own dedicated storage. This way, if one instance goes down, the others can still access the data. Second, configure yoursentinel.conf file so that each instance knows about the other instances in the cluster.

Last, but not least, test your setup! Install Redis on your local machine and try running some commands to see if everything is working as expected. If everything looks good, then you’re ready to deploy Redis in a high-availability setup.

How can you prevent data loss with Redis and Redis Sentinel?

Redis Sentinel is a high availability solution that helps to prevent data loss in the event of a Redis server failure. By configuring multiple Redis servers as sentinels, Sentinel can monitor the health of the servers and automatic failover to a standby server if necessary. This ensures that your data is always available and prevents loss in the event of a failure.

Why Should You Use High Availability?

There are many reasons to use high availability options for your Redis data service. Some of these reasons include:

To ensure that your data is always available and can be quickly accessed by your applications.
To avoid any downtime of your data service, which can be critical for business users.
To improve the performance of your data service by making use of multiple servers.
To increase the security of your data by replicating it across multiple servers.
To reduce the cost of running your Redis data service by using cheaper commodity hardware.

Conclusion

Redis Sentinel is a key component of Redis’ high availability offering. By providing automatic failover and monitoring of your Redis servers, Sentinel gives you the peace of mind that your data is always accessible. If you are running a mission-critical Redis deployment, I highly recommend using Redis Sentinel to ensure that your data is always available.

What is Redis server and why do you need it?

What is Redis Server?

Redis is an open source, in-memory data store that can be used as a database, cache, or message broker. It is often used for web applications to improve performance by storing frequently accessed data in memory. Redis can also be used for other types of applications that require fast data access.

What are the benefits of using Redis Server?

Redis Server is an open source, in-memory data store that can be used as a database, cache, or message broker. It is a popular choice for web applications that require high performance and low latency. Redis Server is easy to use and has a rich set of features that make it a good fit for a variety of use cases.

Redis Server is fast and scalable. It can handle a large number of concurrent connections and has a high throughput. Redis Server is also highly available and can be deployed in a cluster.

Redis Server has a number of features that make it a good choice for web applications. It supports data structures such as lists, sets, and hashes. It also has atomic operations for adding and removing items, as well as fast add and remove operations. This makes redis server a good fit for web applications that require frequent add and update operations, such as content management systems, web chat, and user profiles.

Final Thoughts

If you need a fast, in-memory database for web applications, then Redis server is a good option. It is scalable and highly available. It supports a variety of data structures that can be used for different applications. Its features support both relational and non-relational data modeling. If you’re still wondering what is Redis server, then know that it is a data structure server that can handle a large number of concurrent connections, and is used to store and retrieve data in real-time.