[peterwwillis]

If I were a large enterprise I'd reconsider CentOS. RedHat's lack of a commitment to the customer's experience in favor of RH's personal design preferences smacks of Oracle-ism. Anything they develop they immediately force on their users, and you have to just accept it rather than use it optionally. It's less easy to get away from those kind of changes versus something more open like ubuntu/debian (and I have no love for debian). And then there's the whole secret kernel patches and backported "features"... Then again i'm a dirty hippie who prefers Slackware, so maybe i'm too Linux-libertarian for today's enterprises.

[SEJeff]

Care to elaborate?

Systemd has a few nice features that I (as a systems admin of thousands of servers) really like such as:

    - simple "init script" like upstart, so magical or crappy shell scripts from vendors are a thing of the past. A standardized unit file

    - Ulimit support natively as part of the format

    - Limiting via memory/disk/cpu cgroups to contain buggy apps (hello mysql!)

    - Process restarting so tools like supervisord, monit, runit, etc are no longer necessary

    - It can _always_ stop an errant daemon as it uses control groups to do so, sysv init was sometimes buggy in this regard

    - Private /tmp (via filesystem namespaces), limiting system calls a service can run, tcp wrappers, read only parts of the filesystem (like /etc) are all trivial to add to any legacy service such as bind or sendmail and a supported part of the systemd unit file definition.

RHEL/CentOS 7 also include some super nice things like the new abrtd for centrally reporting any application coredump/kernel issue, pacemaker/crm for high availability clusters, and just a lot newer linux userspace. (yay for du -hsc | sort -h | tail)

As an _actual_ user who uses RHEL/Debian/etc on bare metal at scale, I really see nothing but awesome in RHEL7. It is just like I see awesome in Fedora 20 or in the latest Ubuntu/Debian. The Linux ecosystem has massively grown. Now we have a serious engineering company putting a lot of resources into supporting a new operating system. I'd love to see some of the technical reasons you have the opinion you do.

[peterwwillis]

I'm not going to turn this thread into a debate over the merits of individual contributions to CentOS. All i'm saying is whatever RH develops gets shoved into their distro with seemingly no regard to the customer. It's not just that they're adding new tools, they're also forcing you to use them.

The nice thing to do for your customers is to make new technology optional, and provide alternatives for people who have 10+ year old infrastructure that they don't want to spend 2 years upgrading because it's now full of legacy systems. But RH not only shoves anything they want down your throat, half the time they're not transparent about the changes taking place, and you just have to hope nothing breaks your apps (kernel as an example, but userland package changes are similar).

[SEJeff]

RHEL6 is supported until 2020[1]

[1] https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/