Migrate from CentOS to enterprise Linux for hybrid cloud success

In the era of digital transformation, businesses worldwide are embracing hybrid cloud strategies and benefiting from the cost efficiency and agility of public cloud resources, along with on-premise infrastructure security and control. However, this integration also introduces challenges and complexities like managing multiple platforms, finding staff with diverse skill sets, and ensuring security—for an increasing number of environments that can introduce risk and cost. 

To address these challenges, standardizing on a single operating system (OS) is crucial, and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® stands out as the ideal choice. Whether deploying new applications, moving from datacenters to the cloud, or migrating from other Linux distributions like CentOS Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a solid foundation. Furthermore, Red Hat provides a comprehensive ecosystem of products and partners to support the development, deployment, and scalability of cloud-native applications, making it a perfect fit for organizations’ hybrid cloud requirements. 

CentOS Linux reached end of life (EOL) on June 30, 2024, and migration decisions have been brought to the forefront. It is an important time for organizations to reevaluate environments and adopt a standardized OS that will meet their evolving hybrid cloud and gen AI demands. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers significant advantages for organizations seeking a Linux distribution to meet their hybrid cloud requirements. Key advantages that set Red Hat Enterprise Linux apart from other Linux distributions: 

Cloud compatibility and interoperability

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux is cloud-agnostic and is certified for use with all major cloud providers, giving you the freedom to use multiple clouds in any combination—Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM, Google Cloud, and on-premise systems—to avoid being locked into 1 cloud provider’s stack.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux qualifies for committed spend programs on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the top commercial Linux distributions for public cloud deployments and has more than 4,900 applications from thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) certified for use.

Cost-effectiveness 

• Simplify your migration with Red Hat’s offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux for third-party Linux migration. This offering provides a streamlined transition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux at a significantly reduced cost, offering tools, guidelines, and continued software updates once converted to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, for up to 4 years after CentOS Linux 7 EOL. The Convert2RHEL tool simplifies migration, preserving existing customizations, configurations, and preferences effortlessly.
• Red Hat Developer Subscription for Teams lets organizations running other Red Hat technologies use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for specific development use cases—at no extra cost.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a much higher value and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) over time compared with unpaid alternatives, according to IDC research.¹

Security and performance

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers built-in security features, such as kernel live patching, security profiles, security standards certification, and a trusted software supply chain to meet high security and compliance expectations.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes Red Hat Lightspeed, which boosts your subscription with proactive, AI-powered management and advanced security capabilities. Gain visibility into business, operations, and security risks to identify and mitigate issues across your infrastructure—before they affect your bottom line. Plus, with the Red Hat Satellite add-on, you can automate the remediation process. This combination provides a consistent and stable administrative experience, allowing administrators to spend more time on innovation than on repetitive, error-prone tasks.
• Analyze customer implementations: Satellite provides enhanced SAP workload optimization through issue detection and lifecycle management while Near Zero Downtime Maintenance for SAP guarantees consistent SAP workload performance and uninterrupted updates.

Support and resources

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux is supported by a 24x7 global network of experienced, motivated, and knowledgeable technical support engineers. It also offers a joint support model with Red Hat and an applicable hyperscaler when running in a public cloud environment.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux simplifies hybrid infrastructure management and serves as a robust foundation for diverse deployments, complemented by an extensive ecosystem of Red Hat products, including middleware, agile integration, cloud-native application development, and management and automation solutions that are smoothly integrated and compatible across on-site, hybrid, and multicloud environments, ensuring reliable and consistent performance. Moreover, the strength of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fortified by partnerships with certified industry leaders, such as Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google, SAP, Intel, and Dell Technologies. This collaboration empowers customers with many choices and ensures effortless integration between their preferred products and platforms with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, making it the top choice for modern businesses. To sum it up, what truly distinguishes Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the Linux landscape is its deep integration with the entire Red Hat ecosystem of products and partners. This enhances Red Hat Enterprise Linux capabilities and helps to deliver comprehensive end-to-end solutions to tackle hybrid cloud challenges. 

Red Hat actively develops portfolio architectures based on tested solutions that are currently in production with customers, showcasing the uninterrupted integration of diverse products and technologies. While not always explicitly highlighted in these architectures, Red Hat Enterprise Linux constitutes its foundation in the success of these implementations, providing a stable, security-focused, and high-performance OS environment to deliver a complete platform in combination with other Red Hat products like:  

• Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform: This platform provides automation capabilities, streamlining repetitive tasks and improving efficiency in IT operations. 
• Red Hat OpenShift®: This platform facilitates container orchestration, allowing users to efficiently manage and deploy applications in a cloud-native environment, if they choose to containerize. 

SAP workloads 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions coherently blends tailored issue detection with Red Hat Lightspeed combined with proactive remedies in Ansible Automation Platform. This is overseen using end-to-end lifecycle management with Satellite.  

• Satellite shows how to manage security, policy, and patches efficiently across the SAP server landscape, guaranteeing resilient health, compliance with SAP and Red Hat’s recommendations and peak performance. 

Automation  

Self-healing infrastructure uses historical insights and automation tools for effective remediation, ensuring consistency in hybrid clouds, comprehensive lifecycle management, and automated detection and remediation. Red Hat Satellite allows administrators to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux across clouds or on-premise while Red Hat Lightspeed allows you to gain visibility into business areas, operations, and security risks to proactively identify and mitigate issues across your infrastructure. Ansible Automation Platform facilitates scalable automation for distributed infrastructure, and Red Hat OpenShift offers a unified platform for diverse containerized deployments. 

View our migration offer and more information on how to migrate from CentOS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, features, and benefits.