OK, with that out of the way, let’s take a look at a drawing to help us break down the basic relationship between the major suppliers and consumers. I warn you to read this post with your own critical eye, but this is similar to the voice you’d get out of me if we sat down and had beer together. My daily focus is on paying RHEL customers, and I’m not shy about that, but these are my personal thoughts, and not those of Red Hat officially. For full transparency, I work at Red Hat and I’m the Product Manager for RHEL Server, so I have my expertise and my biases, but I try to be fair to each of the projects discussed. I’ve seen a lot of wild theories on why Red Hat makes some of the decisions it does, and I think transparent articles like this might help quell those. While I think these community focused perspectives are very good, and important, I thought it might also be interesting to hear the perspective of somebody actually responsible for the business health of RHEL Server. I wrote this blog because I think most of the public perspectives, analysis and critiques, in blogs, on Twitter, and such, come from members of the upstream and downstream communities. This makes the beginning of 2022 a great time to take a look at the EL supply chain, identify the major suppliers and consumers, and do a bit of public analysis. Even going back to 2019, the announcement of Red Hat CoreOS, with CRI-O, as an image-based version of RHEL 8 managed by OpenShift 4 was a completely groundbreaking way to think about managing an EL server. The announcement of CentOS Stream as an upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in late 2020, the announcements of Alma Linux and Rocky Linux as downstream rebuilds, and the announcement of AWS Linux 2022 being built as a downstream of Fedora are all really big movements in this space.

Recently, the Enterprise Linux (EL) supply chain has been pretty interesting.

Current red hat linux version