CentOS is deployed in my organization on-premises. I have been working for my current company for the last two years and three months. We have a total of 64 servers in our infrastructure, and out of those, we use 10 to 12 CentOS OS servers. The versions we use are 7 and 8. From my past experience, the server has never rebooted or had any critical situation.

The most suitable feature of CentOS is its exceptional stability, security, and long-term support, which make it a popular choice for enterprise and server environments.

CentOS is widely recognized for providing a stable and secure platform, especially suited for server and mission-critical workloads. Whenever we face critical work, it is easy for our team to handle. For long-term support, each CentOS release generally guarantees long-term updates, ensuring reliability for extended periods.

CentOS should provide updates more regularly. Kernel parameters, sysctl config details, tuned profiles, process prioritization, optimized disk, and input scheduler choice are all points for performance optimization.

Regarding needed improvements, expanding hardware resources, adding more RAM, and switching to SSD storage would ensure hardware is able to match application demand.

I have been using CentOS for above six years.

From my past experience, the server has never rebooted or had any critical situation.

CentOS always provides good feedback. When I install CentOS, it is easy to handle and troubleshoot.

CentOS is stable, reliable, flexible, and very useful.

The experience from the last two months has been very good with CentOS OS.

CentOS's scalability is very supportive for both small deployments and large enterprise environments, making it very flexible. It allows users to scale resources vertically for upgrading hardware and horizontally by adding more servers, making it suitable for modern web hosting and containerized applications.

When we encounter issues or need troubleshooting assistance, we almost always find answers from the community or from other people's experience shared over the internet.

Neutral

On our previous servers, we used RHEL 8 OS. After formatting that server, we installed CentOS OS on request of users. Using it for the last two or three months on the same servers, the server has not automatically rebooted.

When users request to install or create new servers, they specify their preferred OS. They declared for us to install CentOS OS, so we create the servers and install CentOS OS based on their requests.

Recently we have installed MariaDB as a database, and for the OS, we use CentOS. Our physical server, which had RHEL 8 already installed, was not providing good performance. Our user requested to format the physical server and reinstall CentOS OS. I have recently installed CentOS OS version 8 on my physical server.

We provide infrastructure support to our customer, which is an Indian government PSU company, specifically the Ministry of External Affairs. They provided us with their data center. We developed the data center from scratch and created the entire infrastructure. We develop applications and websites, handling all infrastructure support from beginning to high level for our client.

My advice to others considering CentOS is that it offers significant advantages over other operating systems, making it an excellent choice for users seeking reliability and security. Key advantages include stability, reliability, and being free and open-source. It provides 100% free usage, along with security and long-term support.

The most suitable feature of CentOS is its exceptional stability, security, and long-term support, which make it a popular choice for enterprise and server environments.

CentOS is widely recognized for providing a stable and secure platform, especially suited for server and mission-critical workloads. Whenever we face critical work, it is easy for our team to handle. For long-term support, each CentOS release generally guarantees long-term updates, ensuring reliability for extended periods.

For package management, we use YUM and DNF in the new version for flexible and efficient software management.

It depends on our users' requirements for installing CentOS.

Licensing for CentOS is above my management details, so I am not aware of this information.

CentOS always provides good feedback, is easy to handle, and easy to troubleshoot.

The experience with CentOS OS has been very good over the last two months.

I rate CentOS nine out of ten.

On-premises

CentOS is basically the community edition of Red Hat, and to get the flavor of Red Hat, users can visit centos.org to download the CentOS distribution and install it in their virtual machine, VirtualBox, or any Hyper-V platform. It gives users the Linux operating system based upon the Fedora flavor, providing an overview of how the enterprise version of RHEL looks similar to CentOS, though the features are very different.

I have been using it for many years now for my own testing and working with the operating system and Linux features. It's mainly for testing and checking Linux features. For application development and server management features, we have been using CentOS for many years. It offers a wide variety of testing cases and checking Linux features as server management. Linux distribution such as CentOS has many features related to server management, checking storage and networking facilities, and integrating with use cases. One of the key specific projects I worked on was testing server administration-related work such as file protocol testing using SMB and NFS, and checking features for networking and other use cases.

CentOS is an open-source platform that is free to use, which is one of its unique features. It's an operating system that offers a foundational view of Linux systems and has been a go-to operating system for a long time. Even though I've used other versions such as RHEL, SLES, and others including Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and Oracle Linux, CentOS remains a top priority for my daily use cases.

The package management, security, and stability are the main aspects that stand out. Linux's built-in framework provides different layers of security on the file, permissions, and system levels. CentOS offers flexibility in package management features and excellent stability. The installation process is straightforward, even for someone with a basic foundation in Linux, making it user-friendly.

CentOS offers a secure environment with security mechanisms such as SE Linux and firewall protections. You can have a secure setup by having the necessary permissions for users and maintaining system-level access. Users who are not root have minimal command execution abilities, whereas root and sudo users have extended privileges.

Organizations using CentOS save on subscription costs and can run their applications effectively without upgrading to other versions such as RHEL. CentOS helps organizations and startups in cost optimization and application development.

The documentation and support could be improved, along with compatibility with newer hardware as hardware continually evolves over time. Additionally, if CentOS could receive better marketing and promotion, it might gain more traction among vendors, software developers, educational institutions, and colleges.

There is always room for improvement in any product, irrespective of challenges or how good the product is. In the current scenario with cutting-edge technology, improving the product to benefit a larger community would be a positive step.

I have been using CentOS for more than eight years.

Complex setups are not necessary. CentOS's simplicity and stability make it easy to use. It's scalable and user-friendly.

CentOS is scalable and user-friendly without requiring complex configurations.

The documentation and community support are great. I've seen many people across the globe interacting, and when users encounter issues, the community provides solutions. I faced an issue long ago, and it was resolved through the open-source community forum.

Positive

I have only used RHEL besides CentOS. RHEL is the enterprise-level flavor of CentOS itself. It's almost identical to CentOS.

The installation of CentOS is simple, offering both minimal and GUI installation options. A typical layman with a basic Linux foundation can easily navigate through the installation process.

The enterprise subscription cost is at a certain level, but CentOS saves customers from paying additional money, optimizing costs for enterprises and startups involved in application development.

Many are unaware of this operating system due to its open-source nature, but adequate marketing could allow many vendors, software people, institutions, and colleges to leverage CentOS. CentOS is a straightforward, non-complex operating system that offers great use cases.

Documentation and community support are crucial, and CentOS has active community engagement to assist users facing issues.

There is always room for improvement irrespective of how good the product is. Embracing new technology is essential.

I rate CentOS a nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Other

There are a lot of applications posted on CentOS machines, so I'm using this for supporting those applications.

The middleware applications such as Tomcat, Java, Apache HTTPd are examples of applications I'm supporting with CentOS. These applications are hosted on CentOS machines, and all of them are highly critical. We should take care, fix vulnerabilities that are reported, and implement necessary configuration changes, all of which are supported by my team.

Mainly, I'm supporting middleware applications with CentOS. Apart from that, I have many other use cases such as jobs running on the server that we need to maintain. If any space issues arise, we must clear them so the jobs will run properly. We manage the users logging into the servers and everything else.

These are the major things I'm supporting using CentOS.

CentOS offers an open community, so whatever issues arise, the solution is available in the open community, making it easy to search on Google and find fixes for the issues we are facing.

I find the performance and scalability very valuable in CentOS. CentOS excels in these aspects. Regarding security, as mentioned earlier, from the open community, whenever a new patch releases, we receive notifications and can review user experiences and potential issues before applying patches. Everything is easily accessible there, and when it comes to scalability and stability, CentOS provides a very good experience.

CentOS has positively impacted my organization since it is open source, reducing costs significantly. The performance given by CentOS is excellent, and no issues are being reported for applications, so everything is managed within this operating system. In terms of performance, it functions extremely well if we have enough RAM and storage space. We have not faced any CPU utilization alerts, and there have been no downtime reports from CentOS. That has been a great advantage for us.

I have been using CentOS in my current organization for the past six years.

Regarding specific metrics, when it comes to cost saving, it saves significant amounts. We have saved approximately 50% of our revenue by using CentOS. When it comes to downtime, previously we experienced downtime at least monthly, and now it has been significantly reduced.

On-premises

Other

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.

We use the solution for file servers and emails. It is an operating system. Our email server, file server, and web server are running on CentOS.

The product is stable. We have to update it every once in a while. The vendor updates the tool regularly to solve vulnerabilities. We have to do patches. The software and hardware compatibility are updated. The vendor updates the versions to keep up with the new hardware.

The solution must improve its security. It must provide security against hackers. The security features must always be updated.

I have been using the solution for more than 15 years.

The tool is stable. I rate the stability a ten out of ten. It doesn’t shut down or crash.

The tool is not for large systems. We have about 20 users in our organization. We are not planning to change the solution for now.

We get plenty of support from the web. Since the product is open-sourced, a lot of community support is available. We can find answers to our queries.

The initial setup is easy. I rate the ease of setup an eight or nine out of ten. The time taken for deployment depends on what we have to add to the tool. Generally, the deployment can be done in about an hour.

The product is free. It’s open-sourced. It is the biggest advantage of the product.

Many software applications are open source. We do not have to spend money on them. Many people are using CentOS. It is a popular OS for those who don’t want to spend lots of money on Windows. People who are knowledgeable in setting up servers use the product. Those who do not know the technical setup choose Windows. CentOS users are programmers with technical knowledge.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

On-premises

We used the solution as an operating system. We were using CentOS because it supported the Red Hat flavor. Now that CentOS has stopped providing the support, we have switched to Alma OS.

We used the solution as an operating system. The solution is simple to use.

Currently, CentOS is not providing support, so you will not get new packages that are compatible with that operating system.

The solution provides good stability.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

Around 70% of our organization is using CentOS.

We previously used Ubuntu. We switched to CentOS because it was a business requirement, and our clients demanded it.

CentOS is an open source that is free of cost.

I would recommend CentOS to other users because it supports the Red Hat flavor. It is easy to integrate the solution with other tools and systems.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.