The shortest path to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS

I am the host of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Presents podcast. I am a technical marketer for RHEL and I've been to DevOps concerts, Linux conferences. Uh and I am a tried and true Kansas City Chiefs fan. That's all I'm gonna say about that.

Um but today we are going to be talking about the shortest path from uh third party Linuxes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And because we're here at re:Invent, I'm gonna walk you through how to do it with your existing CentOS Linux workloads right in the AWS cloud.

So thank you so much to AWS for inviting us out here. Uh this is my second year at this event and really, really enjoyed uh my time here, I'm available all over the internet. It's easy to find me. IT guy, Eric.

Um so I usually do my introduction now, but that's me, go find me. Although truth be told my twitter handle has been discontinued, so I've got less than 20 minutes.

Um but I could talk all day, so I'll try not to. Uh so we're gonna be talking about a very important date uh that has been affectionately coined TechMageddon 2024. We'll talk a little bit about that. Uh we'll introduce Convert2RHEL, one of the utilities that comes with your Red Hat Enterprise Link subscription.

And because I like to send everybody home with homework, to get back at all. my teachers, there's some extra credit for you, for you all to take with you, man. everybody. Jet lag. I don't know about y'all, but I'm, I'm uh I'm, I'm ramped up. I'm ready to go uh four days on my feet. uh eating cafeteria food. it'll be awesome.

All right. So i, i jokingly called it TechMageddon 2024. And if, if you catch me doing one of the longer versions of this presentation, there's actually about nine different events between May 30th, May 31st and June 30th of 2024.

Uh CentOS Linux 7 is going end of life and we'll talk about that in depth here in just a minute. Red Hat Enterprise. Linux 7 is actually going end of maintenance. There's other things like uh RHEL 8 will be going into uh into maintenance mode CentOS Stream 8 will actually be going into builds which is fairly similar, but today, I've got 20 minutes. So I'm gonna focus on just these two events.

So CentOS Linux 7 June 30th 2024. Let me say that one more time. June 30th 2024. Guess what? We're knocking on December's door. So June will be here long before you expect it to be. And, uh, so at that point, CentOS Linux 7 will go end of life.

Now, what does that not mean? Of course, I see, I see a fellow Broncos fan in the back. I, I swore I'd stop making football jokes. It, it talks, but I can't help it anyway.

Uh, so what is, what is end of life for CentOS Linux 7 mean what that means is you'll no longer be able to have access to the repositories or to the installers. It will effectively be end of life.

Now, what does that not mean? That doesn't mean that on July 1st that all of your CentOS Linux 7 systems will just shut down. They won't uninstall. There's, there's no self-destruct. This isn't Mission Impossible where you got five seconds to run away, but it does mean that your systems will no longer get any bug fixes. Your systems will no longer uh get any type of vulnerability protection.

So it will be for all intents and purposes be dead. So CentOS Linux 7 is going away next year. So if you're here at AWS, you probably uh at re:Invent and you're listening to this talk, it's probably because you have a number of workloads that are running on CentOS Linux 7 at this time on AWS cloud.

I've got one honest person in the audience. So, so what do we do in that situation, by the way, if you don't think that June is coming out quick enough, that's how long you got, you got 216 days and that is accurate. I checked this morning.

So if any of you have seen any of my presentations online or any of the podcasts, I've been a part of over the years. You know, that I have that open source, has a special place in my heart. I love open source. I love the Linux community. I would not be wearing the shirt at this event working for a company like Red Hat if it weren't for the open source community and the amazing friendships that I've, that I've made, that's it.

Community projects are just that they're community projects. The problem with that is means it's perfect for my home lab. My kids love the Minecraft server that I run in a Podman container on top of my RHEL 9.3 virtual machine that runs on my home lab.

But do I want a community project to manage my multimillion or multibillion dollar infrastructure when I'm taking in customer data? When I'm processing transactions when I'm supporting medical, medical equipment? Do I want to depend on the open source community for that? My answer humbly is no.

So the problem is you lack the enterprise scale support that you would expect with any product, you lack the security certifications. So anybody that's worked in government health care, taking processing payment or processing credit card payments with customer data. You know, there are stringent requirements in order to run those workloads in certain environments.

There are no security certifications for CentOS Linux. And let me tell you having worked on the RHEL team for the last three ish years is expensive. It's time consuming because let's let's be honest, they're regulatory environments. So of course, it's going to be expensive and time consuming and frustrating. But that, that's not something that we want our open source engineers to focus on is it you don't want to go out to GitHub and start working on a project and be able and have to stifle your creativity just to meet those security requirements. That's not what the community is for. That's not what open source is about.

In fact, open source is about innovation and collaboration. So let's make sure that we keep our community collaboration going when there's companies like Red Hat and others that are focused more on the enterprise use case.

Also along the same lines as our security certification question is the ecosystem. Not many companies are going to certify their, their hardware for a community project, not a lot of development, organizations, not a lot of engineers are going to certify their work on a community environment.

So how does that impact uh Red Hat? How does that, how does the end of life of CentOS Linux 7 affect your infrastructure. Might I recommend if you're looking for if you're running an enterprise workload that you look for an enterprise? Linux? In fact, a little hint it's in the name Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

All right. I thought it was funny. Anyway, so there's been a lot of questions as of late about, about the RHEL ecosystem, about our development life cycle. What is our development story? I've got, I don't have all the time that I'd like to go in on this, but here's the short of it.

Red Hat engineers are hired to work on Fedora, on CentOS Stream and on RHEL. We've got some that focus strictly on just the Fedora kernel. We've got other engineers that focus strictly on security certifications for RHEL. We've got engineers that work in every corner of the ecosystem that we're a part of and what that's come to look like in the last few years.

So we go out to Linus's GitHub repository and we pull down the latest kernel build. We pull that into Fedora Linux. Just between you all and me. I actually prefer Fedora Linux for my desktop workloads. It's a little bit more cutting edge. It's a little bit quicker to get new features. And I don't, I don't need to call Red Hat for support for my desktop. So I use Fedora Linux for my, for my desktop.

So don't judge me for my MacBook on stage, I didn't want to hold my Fedora workstation on the plane. So and then a few years ago, we made this, we made the switch CentOS, the CentOS community could not see themselves running two different distributions. They had CentOS Linux, which is going end of life now and then they had CentOS Stream. This was something new that companies like Red Hat and Facebook now. Meta.

Um I believe Google and others were involved in to develop the next generation of enterprise Linux distributions. So because we are already well acquainted with the CentOS community, Red Hat wanted to get behind this idea of Stream.

Stream is like community development on steroids. Because what that does is you've got large telecommunications companies, you've got companies like Red Hat companies like Meta who basically build their own infrastructure. They don't follow the traditional infrastructure scheme that a lot of our organizations do.

So CentOS Stream allows you to see what the next version, what the next iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is going to look like. And then of course, like you've had for the last 21 years now, 20 or 21. No, it's 21 cause RHEL is old enough to drink anyway, then you've got RHEL which has been the been basically the same for the last 21 years except now as of RHEL 8 and into RHEL 9 and upcoming in RHEL 10, you've got that predictable life cycle.

10 years of support, five years of maintenance, uh, five years of full support, five years of maintenance support, you know, that we're going to release every six months. A new minor version, by the way, if you missed it RHEL 9.3 and 8.9 just came out about two or three weeks ago. And then on top of that, you've got, predictable major release life cycles.

So, you know, that major releases are good for 10 years and they come out every three years. So guess what, this, this spring when we have Red Hat Summit 24 in Colorado. If you haven't gotten your tickets, please, please do. So, I didn't say that anyway, if you, if you come to Summit, you know, that RHEL 9 will have hit its two year birthday. And so you can logically assume that in 2025 you'll be looking at RHEL 10.

So, you know, all those things, it makes it so much easier to schedule resources, systems, administrator, hardware refreshes, database upgrades. You can plan your maintenance windows around those dates because, you know, sometime in spring around May ish and sometime in, in the fall around November ish, you know that we'll be releasing a new minor version.

So I've kind of talked to, talked through this slide a little bit in just in passing. So I won't spend much time on it. But if you've got an enterprise workload and you've got customers that are depending on you to do your, to do what you've advertised, what you've sold them, whether that's providing a collaboration platform, providing a health care service, you've got SLAs, why not work with an organization who can provide you support consulting services in place upgrades, supported conversions, live kernel patching.

All these features come with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and that's just my top 10 favorites. So for years, as systems administrators, I was a sysadmin for 10 years. So I'm speaking from, from my own heart and my own wounds. When I say that for years, we were set. And anytime you want to make a major change, you had to go in and rip and replace, you had to buy all the latest Dell servers or all the latest HPE servers.

I, I wish I had a nickel for every time I cut myself trying to get a Dell PowerEdge racked in the rack. I see a few nods. So I've got some, I've got some fellow infrastructure folks in the room, but that's changing. That's changing so rapidly now, more and more you can do in place. And that's what we're talking about today is the fact that you can take an in-place conversion and convert from CentOS Linux 7 and a couple of others to their equivalent Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

So when you do that conversion process, you get all the, all the same features, all the same benefits and you didn't have to duplicate your hardware. You didn't have to spin up a brand new ecosystem on AWS, spin up a whole new VPC, set up all the networking rules. You didn't have to duplicate your infrastructure, it just does it in place.

So I kind of talked to this too. What I wanna do is because this process usually takes about 20 minutes. I, I have done you all a favor and have cut down what would be a live demo into a video that I wanna talk you through right now.

So, what we are looking at is the AWS EC2 console, which if you're running any workload anywhere on AWS, this is probably not new to you. Sorry, I got sidetracked by the fact that there's actually captions at the top of the screen. That's really cool. This is, this is why I have slides. This keeps me on track.

So what you're looking at, I, in this, in this presentation is you've got, I've got one CentOS Linux 7 system a t3 medium running on AWS. This is running CentOS Linux. It's marked as inferred because there's no way to guarantee that that's actually what's running. That's what it was really originally provisioned as and that won't change after we do our in-place conversion.

So if you go out to AWS to the marketplace there is actually, we'll talk about this offering here in just a minute. There's a RHEL for Third Party Linux Migration page, which actually is a special offer that you can sign up for to do in place conversions and get a few extra things which we'll talk about next.

But if you go in and you sign up for this offer, put in the number of vCPUs. This is month to month. It'll tell you how much is due. Whether or not you said auto renew for my demo. I didn't cause i didn't want to file the finance report. But if...