Facebook, Twitter Proposing CentOS Hyperscale SIG With Newer Packages + Other Changes

Adding to the changes abound at CentOS beyond CentOS 8 going EOL at year's end to focus instead on CentOS Stream feeding into the future RHEL, the likes of Facebook and Twitter are now proposing a Hyperscale special interest group for this RHEL-based platform.

The Hyperscale SIG will be focused on catering the Linux distribution usage to large-scale infrastructures like those used at Facebook, Twitter, and other "hyperscaler" organizations like cloud providers.

At least the initial focus of the CentOS Hyperscale SIG would be on providing faster-moving package backports, alternative policy and configuration options, and large-scale testing of distribution wide changes.

The faster-moving package backports is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this SIG for hyperscalers. For select packages the new versions would be more quickly packaged and available to CentOS users. For this, the SIG would be looking to host one or more package repositories to provide the updated packages for those interested. Likewise, packages with modified policy and configuration alternatives would be shipped via the repository too. All of the packaging infrastructure would continue on CentOS.org.

This Hyperscaler SIG would be basing their work off CentOS Stream, given the project's shift from CentOS 8 to Stream moving forward. One example of a package they are looking to update more timely for CentOS is the systemd components.

The CentOS Hyperscale SIG will be voted upon at this week's CentOS board meeting.

Initial members of the proposed CentOS Hyperscale SIG are engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Verizon.

Details on this planned special interest group for hyperscalers via the CentOS Wiki.