US Government woke up to the fact that allowing vendors waivers on requirements for upgrades ends up with nothing ever happening. CentOS7 is EOL'd next year.
Additionally, there was fun of FIPS-140 and OpenSSL older than 3.0.
Alma and Rocky were considered, but that would still involve (possibly similarly painful) migration as with CentOS 6 -> 7.
Have you seen pricing for RHEL? We're talking hundreds thousands of systems. I never seen raw stats, but I would have been totally unsurprised to see them hit million instances across all clouds used, at least occassionally.
Decoupling software from distro dependencies was seen as a way to future proof deployment story and avoid situations like we had with CentOS 7, where they really, really would have liked upgrading some stuff for newer APIs, but couldn't due to mess with OS-provided dependencies.
decoupling meant something like using "distroless" or static builds (musl?) or simply shipping everything on an alpine/ubuntu/debian/whatever image? (and previously there was no containerization, but now there is)
Alma and Rocky were considered, but that would still involve (possibly similarly painful) migration as with CentOS 6 -> 7.
Have you seen pricing for RHEL? We're talking hundreds thousands of systems. I never seen raw stats, but I would have been totally unsurprised to see them hit million instances across all clouds used, at least occassionally.
Decoupling software from distro dependencies was seen as a way to future proof deployment story and avoid situations like we had with CentOS 7, where they really, really would have liked upgrading some stuff for newer APIs, but couldn't due to mess with OS-provided dependencies.