Prepare now for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 End of Maintenance

As RHEL 7 approaches the end of maintenance in June 2024, now is the time to build and execute your upgrade plan. Your best defense against the risk of non-compliant RHEL systems is upgrading to RHEL 8 or RHEL 9.
In this presentation, Red Hat's Bob Handlin and Bob Mader share techniques to address the critical steps in our recommended RHEL in-place upgrades process.
Learn more: red.ht/upgraderhel
Find our Ansible Playbook:
github.com/redhat-cop/infra.l...

[@SnowTheParrot]

Prepare for End of RHEL 7? 🤣More like prepare for the end of RHEL PERIOD! Are you even RHEL anymore? Or is it IBM now? You deff can't claim the "L" in your name, because Linux is OPEN SOURCE, while RedHat IBM IS NOT.

[@scottmcbrien6535]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to be, as it always has been, open source. In mid-2024, RHEL 7 will go End-of-Maintenance (as it has reached the end of it's 10 year maintenance lifecycle), RHEL8 will leave 'Full Support' and enter it's 5 year Maintenance phase. RHEL9 will continue in 'Full Support' phase until mid-2027 and you should expect RHEL10 released in mid-2025. Consequently, there's no need to prepare for the end of RHEL because we're continuing to make it on our predictable release cadence of minor-releases twice a year and a major release every 3 years.
I can't speak for everyone at Red Hat, but my personal experience as a Red Hatter is that not much has changed after the acquisition of Red Hat by IBM. Red Hat is still managed by Red Hatters, many of whom (like myself) have been with Red Hat a very long time. I know people like to throw shade at IBM, but my actual, lived experience doesn't match up with the outside criticism I often read online.

[@RedHatEnterpriseLinux]

Great explanation, Scott!

[@itguyeric]

Fake news...

[@SnowTheParrot]

@@RedHatEnterpriseLinux Do i actually think this is the end of RHEL? No...RHEL, as its name implies, is an Enterprise system. And Enterprise companies don't care about open source. RedHat will continue as it has. RHEL as an open source system was a dream that lasted longer than it shouldve. That being said, since you guys are making so much money, can you give us a better GUI? I know its the server that's important, but if youre going to go full on Windows/Mac style, at least give us a cool workstation! I've been using RHEL for years, I've been your biggest supporter, I'm just having a hard time handling this...because I am a professional, but at the same time, a hobbyist and an OpenSource idealist. Those two things contradict each other.

[@scottmcbrien6535]

@@SnowTheParrot Regardless of what Enterprise Companies do or don't care about Open Source, Red Hat does, and I think you see that borne out in our continued contributions to not just Red Hat stuff, but contributed back to the Open Source community as a whole. Last year we did a feature on Network Chuck and in the comments someone responded and said something like "I have cockpit on Ubuntu too!", and yes, yes Ubuntu has it to. But the top committers to the Cockpit project are Red Hat employees. Podman is largely developed by Red Hatters, but it's become a standard software included across Linux distributions, because Red Hat continues to work "Upstream First" instead of making software exclusively, or privately, available in RHEL. Red Hat literally employs thousands of people who work on and contribute to open source software every.single.day.
@Eric Hendricks, see, SEE! Server with GUI, it's a thing!!!! (Eric and I have a fun disagreement on this topic, so I just have to poke him on it...)