CentOS Stream 9 (X86-64) with support by Fleximg - Kernel 6.4

My main use case for CentOS  is that we use it on some of our devices for VoIP or unified communications.

A lot of our older virtual appliances run CentOS , which includes our conference bridges and telephony switches.

The best feature CentOS offers is that it's free.

Stability is an important feature among others.

CentOS has impacted our organization positively by giving us an operating system for many of our virtual appliances, but for detailed information, you would need to consult someone in a higher position.

I think CentOS can be improved, but it's not really a viable option anymore. It could be brought back, but that seems unnecessary now that Rocky Linux  exists.

I have been working in my current career field for almost 12 years.

In my experience, CentOS is stable.

I haven't seen any issues with CentOS's scalability as I haven't had to scale it.

I did not previously use a different solution.

CentOS was the standard for our appliances, though I did not have any input in that decision.

Everything we did with CentOS was internal for the company, at Mitel.

My advice for others looking into using CentOS is to use Rocky Linux  instead.

I do not wish to add anything else about the features, including security, performance, or ease of management.

I haven't noticed any specific outcomes such as reduced costs, easier maintenance, better reliability in our team's day-to-day work, or less downtime.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate CentOS an 8.

Private Cloud

Other

My main use case for CentOS  is technical support, fixing the network or service-related technical issues faced by the customers.

One of our products, a web server based on Nginx, uses CentOS  as the base OS. When a customer calls me stating they're not able to access the web UI of a certain product or not able to access the web server, I use the terminal to see the status of the services using different Linux commands. I can also try to restart the web services from CentOS commands; that's how I usually use it.

Sometimes I use CentOS to create cron jobs when I want a server to perform certain tasks at specific times. Instead of doing it manually, I can create automatic cron jobs so a service will be executed on a certain date or time.

In my experience, the best feature that CentOS offers is the network configuration of a device from the command-line interface, which is exceptionally clean.

Since joining my organization, which has been using CentOS, I've observed that all products with CentOS as a base OS run smoothly.

Even when a product does not function optimally, the base OS CentOS works smoothly; we can see the status of the services with the command-line interface, making it very efficient.

I think CentOS should introduce more security patches to fix different vulnerabilities.

I have been using CentOS for 10 years.

In my experience, CentOS is very stable.

CentOS's scalability for my organization has handled growth and changing needs smoothly.

The customer support for CentOS is amazing.

I would rate the customer support for CentOS a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Positive

I am not aware of any different solution that was previously used before CentOS, as I was not part of the organization before, so I cannot comment on that.

I have seen a return on investment in terms of time. It saved a lot of time through troubleshooting, which gives us substantial room for improvement in terms of fixing things, so time saved is a good return on investment.

My experience with CentOS in terms of pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is an open-source operating system, so there was no cost in terms of deploying it or getting the license for it.

CentOS was the clear choice before choosing it; no other options were evaluated.

My advice to others looking into using CentOS is to go for it; it's the best OS. I rate CentOS 9 out of 10.

On-premises

We started using CentOS  for our operations as soon as it became available. Initially, we used CentOS  for its long-term support. It served as a stable production environment. However, they changed from a long-term support cycle and started dropping new versions every two or three years, making it less ideal for stable production environments. We experienced some incidents after updates, which led us to switch to long-term support on AlmaLinux .

CentOS was a stable and predictable environment, providing a consistent update cycle once a month. Their updates initially followed the schedule of Fedora and RHEL  distributions, focusing on delivering a stable testing environment. However, the update cycle changed when CentOS was prioritized for updates, causing stability issues. We began to experience incidents with updates that disrupted features. Consequently, our organization transitioned to AlmaLinux  for its long-term support.

CentOS removed long-term support, and version releases every two to three years are not ideal for production environments because they necessitate frequent updates.

I have been using this solution for probably more than ten to twelve years.

We did not experience any problems integrating CentOS within our existing infrastructure because it remains a RHEL-based distribution.

I believe CentOS is stable, but we are gradually moving away from it. Currently, we have five to ten servers on CentOS out of our 60 to 70-service environment.

I think CentOS remains a stable solution, but it is not our primary platform due to the reduced long-term support.

We never used customer support as we did not pay for those services. However, I would rate the documentation about eight in terms of usefulness.

Positive

Setting up CentOS is straightforward, and you simply boot from a CD to get started.

CentOS is a free product with free updates. There are third-party companies available for support, but they charge varying amounts for their services.

We evaluated RHEL . It offers various enhancements, like the Ansible  Tower , which includes a GUI and scheduling features. However, RHEL's pricing is high, making it less attractive.

Overall, I would not recommend CentOS for production environments because it requires frequent updates every two to three years due to its lack of long-term support. However, for learning Linux or experimental use, CentOS is a suitable and cost-effective platform with ample documentation. I would probably rate it about seven to eight.

On-premises

We primarily use the solution for testing software and applications in the IT industry. I also study the storage system of AI on CentOS .

CentOS adapts well to many software and applications, providing good compatibility. Additionally, there are many online communities to learn from, which is beneficial.

CentOS can be somewhat difficult for beginners, as it has a complex UI, especially for those not in the IT field. Adding more support could be beneficial, though Red Hat with IBM support is an alternative that may be costly. Also, modernizing CentOS could be a suggestion.

CentOS is a stable operating system, and I would rate its stability as nine out of ten.

I do not have personal experience with customer service for CentOS.

Positive

The initial setup was very easy. I would rate the ease of setup at 8.5 out of ten.

I am not responsible for the setup cost in my company, so I am unsure about the cost of the license.

I recommend CentOS for its stability and its ability to adapt to many software and applications. It is also very accessible.

Our clients are pharmaceutical companies, and they're hesitant to change anything that's working. They want us to continue with what's proven. So we stayed on CentOS 7 for a long time. If we changed, we'd have to provide extensive validation that the new operating system is perfect and has no vulnerabilities.

However, CentOS 7 reached its end of life a few months ago, forcing us to migrate to CentOS 9. This was a big effort because we have a lot of in-house servers. For the production servers on AWS, we didn't face any issues migrating from CentOS 7.

The in-depth documentation available for CentOS is great. If I need to install a feature or fix a server issue, I can easily find answers online. The CentOS community is also vast and helpful. Overall, I think it's a very good Linux distribution.

We work on the terminal. If you work on the server, the command-line interface makes perfect sense because we need to do automation, and that requires entering commands. The command-line utility works perfectly. I have no issues with it.

For security, we have an AWS load balancer in front of our servers. We don't give public access to our CentOS servers directly. That's why I haven't focused much on CentOS's security features, as AWS is ultimately responsible for the security.

One issue I recently faced, but I think it was due to my IT support guys, was that when the server storage gets full, the service crashes. It's very difficult to regain access and stability in that situation. That could be improved.

So, the stability might be improved. But I don't think it's a CentOS-level issue. The system administrators need to come up with a solution for that, but I don't think it's CentOS's fault. I haven't done any research [R&D] on this issue.

There's one thing for sure. We recently migrated from CentOS 7 to CentOS 9, and it was a bit difficult. For example, updating Windows is simple; you just download it, and it takes about 15-20 minutes. But that's not the case with migrating from CentOS 7 to 9. 

We had to back up the entire server, launch a new server, and then restore the backup to the new server. We couldn't directly migrate. I think that was a bit of a problem. The setup and updates are not that new in CentOS.

Everyone in my company has used CentOS from the very beginning. So, we've been using it for the past five to six years. We used CentOS 7 for four or five years. 

It's very stable. We've hosted other solutions for about three to five years, and I've never seen an issue at the OS level. But upgrades are a different story.

It is a pretty scalable product. Currently, our production schools are hosted on CentOS. So, that is about ten lakhs (one million) users could be using it. I'm not entirely sure about the exact number, but since the application is hosted on the CentOS operating system, that's the approximate user base.

A ton of articles are available on the internet about CentOS, so I haven't really felt the need for active support. But overall, you can say that the internet is still a great source of information on how to work with CentOS.

The setup is pretty straightforward. We've installed other facilities that are just as good. There's nothing particularly different in the process.

The integration is as good as any other Linux platform. If another Linux platform can integrate with something, then CentOS can also integrate with it.

I think we don't pay for it. It's a Linux distribution, so it's open source. But I'm not sure if they might be charging for support or not because I haven't contacted their support.

For CentOS, I would rate it as nine out of ten.

CentOS is pretty old now, so I wouldn't recommend anyone use it. Everyone should follow the Docker container model at the moment. They should build their Alpine images of Dockers and host them. 

If they want to host them in the cloud, then AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service) works fine. If they want to host their services on-premises, they can use Kubernetes to host them.