Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Farewell CentOS, Hello Rocky Linux & Cloud-Native Supercomputing For Everyone
By Gregory Kurtzer,
Founder and CEO of CIQ
Despite all the headlines I'm reading
that scream "uncertainty," I don't feel any dread about the future, at least in
the area that has captured my professional passion. In fact, I am actually
quite confident that 2023 will deliver some very positive advancements, and I'm
looking forward to the year ahead. If you are interested in the world of
enterprise-grade infrastructure or performance intensive computing, here are
two predictions that are "money in the bank":
- In 2023, Rocky Linux-the free, open source
Enterprise Linux operating system coupled with reliable and fine-tuned
support models that drive down infrastructure costs-will be embraced as
the replacement for CentOS that enterprises need for physical, cloud,
virtual, and containers.
- In 2023, we'll see new tools that harness the power
of containers, along with new ways to securely and easily automate
software deployment, supply chain security, and lifecycle management at
scale, transforming and modernizing performance intensive computing
architectures for HPC/supercomputing and enterprise use-cases.
Farewell CentOS, Hello Rocky Linux
Two years ago, Red Hat decided to
end-of-life CentOS, an open source enterprise Linux distribution. At the time,
CentOS, which had been around for 18 years, was the No. 1 Linux distribution in
the enterprise and had a huge following, including some of the most
well-recognized companies in the world (Toyota, Disney, Verizon, and many, many
more). CentOS was also the distribution of choice for most organizations
building
performance intensive computing architectures, including big data analytics,
artificial intelligence and machine learning. So to say the
decision to end-of-life CenOS was a shock to the ecosystem would be an
understatement. It was certainly a shock to me, as one of the original founders
of CentOS in 2004.
CentOS users were abruptly left empty
handed, looking for an alternative Enterprise Linux distribution that was free,
reliable, secure, and well-supported for the long-term, safe from the dictates
of a single corporate entity. That's when I decided to build another
community-based free Enterprise Linux operating system, and the result was
Rocky Linux. Rocky Linux was designed to deliver the value of CentOS, but with
a governance structure that intentionally makes it virtually impossible for one
company to take over the project. (You can read more about that structure and
the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation here.)
As we enter 2023, I can confidently
state that the world can now say goodbye to CentOS and embrace Rocky Linux as
their open source Linux distribution of choice. The migration is already well
underway; an Hyperion Research study conducted this year indicated 72.1% of
CentOS users planned to migrate from CentOS to another operating system and
Rocky Linux is already at a 20.6% overall adoption (and even higher in the
government sector, where Rocky Linux is at a 37.5% adoption rate). The Rocky
Linux community has worked hard to help former CentOS users overcome the hassle
they've experienced and emerge with a rock-solid Linux distribution they can
count on for the long run. Recipient of HPCwire's Readers'
Choice award for "Top 5 New Products or Technologies to Watch," Rocky Linux
is already among the most frequently adopted Linux distributions. According
to metrics tracked by the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL)
Special Interest Group (SIG), Rocky Linux adoption is outpacing all other
Enterprise Linux variants. Since the project was launched, there have
consistently been over 250,000 downloads per month, and project growth
continues rapidly, with some of the largest names in enterprise cloud computing
stepping up as supporters of the
community, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and VMware.
Most recently, Rakuten
Symphony threw its full support behind Rocky Linux, because it meets the
performance and economic needs of large, disaggregated and open telecom 5G+
network deployments.
In 2023, we'll see the migration away
from CentOS continue to the point where CentOS will become an artifact of the
past, and Rocky Linux will clearly emerge as its leading replacement. As such,
Rocky Linux will serve as the backbone of enterprise and professional
infrastructure, multi-node environments, HPC clusters, and AI running in
multi-node environments, where we will see another transformation in 2023...
New Tools Will Simplify Performance
Intensive Computing (PIC) Complexity
Containerization has simplified
software deployment with its "write once, run anywhere" capabilities. Enabled
by technologies like Docker, Apptainer (formerly Singularity), and Kubernetes,
containerization also has empowered users to deploy the software they need to
do their jobs without requiring the time and talent of infrastructure
engineers.
But the scale of containerization in
PIC leads to a unique quandary of container complexity. Researchers find
themselves managing anywhere from 100 to 1,000 of compute nodes or more at a
time, which typically means they are devoting too much of their time to system
administration and too little to research. As my colleague Glen Otero, Director
of Scientific Computing, Genomics AI and Machine Learning at CIQ, described,
"You don't start out thinking, ‘I'm going to get into system administration of
clusters. You start out as somebody who's going to go do something huge in
science. But you wind up in this space, because - we joke about it - you
volunteered to set up the system. And then once you did, it's like, ‘Hey, can you
also do this? Can you also do that?' And then you wake up one day and you're
like, ‘Where did my life go? I was supposed to do research.'"
Fortunately, a new wave of
simplification is on the rise in PIC. In 2023, we will see rising adoption of
tools that simplify the containerization of code and curtail the need for
highly skilled (and expensive) developers to create custom builds. We demonstrated
this capability earlier this year by using open source Apptainer to containerize OpenRadioss,
subsequently deploying the code successfully on a crash model for the Toyota Camry.
Another major improvement comes in the form of cluster management and
provisioning, using open source tools like Warewulf.
Addressing the needs of both
traditional PIC solutions and cloud-native supercomputing, this new wave of
containerization and more advanced automation will unleash productivity,
integration, and supply chain security across the PIC ecosystem. This ecosystem
includes not only scientific research organizations but also a rapidly growing
number of enterprises who are leveraging HPC, machine learning (ML), artificial
intelligence (AI), and big data for competitive advantage.
Reliable Rocky Linux and Simplified
PIC Containerization
These two trends are why I'm so
optimistic about 2023. Bottom line: The future is bright for anyone in
research, academia, and industry who is looking to harness the full power of
computational resources and easily and efficiently execute critically important
performance-intensive workloads.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gregory M. Kurtzer is a 20+ year
veteran in Linux, open source, and high performance computing. He is well known
in the HPC space for designing scalable and easy to manage secure architectures
for innovative performance-intensive computing while working for the U.S.
Department of Energy and a joint appointment to UC Berkeley. Greg founded and
led several large open source projects such as CentOS Linux, the Warewulf and
PERCEUS cluster toolkits, the container system Singularity and most recently,
the successor to CentOS, Rocky Linux.