In a blow to Red Hat, LinkedIn has made the decision to migrate its servers, VMs, and containers from CentOS Linux to Azure Linux.

CentOS was a popular community Linux distro based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), maintaining full compatibility with its parent distro. Eventually, Red Hat took over the project, killing the distro and ending support for the most recent CentOS 8 much sooner than anyone expected. The older, but more popular, CentOS 7 was slated to go end-of-life (EOL) on June 30, 2024.

Like many companies that relied on CentOS, LinkedIn had to decide on a migration path to move its various systems to a supported Linux distro. Given how much ill will Red Hat created within the Linux community, and among organization that relied on CentOS, it’s not surprising that LinkedIn looked for a non-Red Hat solution. Given that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, it’s even less surprising the company opted to go with Microsoft’s Azure Linux distro.

Nonetheless, as LinkedIn’s Ievgen Priadka, Sweekar Pinto, and Bubby Rayber point out in a blog post, moving to Azure Linux helped the company meet two critical goals:

The move to Azure Linux supported two critical goals: providing a modern, secure operating system to reliably serve over 1 billion LinkedIn members worldwide; and delivering innovative new AI-powered features to members faster. Beyond these goals, other critical factors in our decision were cost-effectiveness, customization, scalability, community support, and compliance.

The team then goes on to outline the lengthy process undertaken to ensure a smooth transition, including planning, pilot programs, infrastructure preparation, onboarding teams, data migration, and more. Almost immediately, LinkedIn began to notice improved deployment speed, as well as other benefits, from the move to Azure Linux.

Azure Linux offered our teams a sense of familiarity mixed with novelty. Our core team delivered a series of prototype hosts, which came with a pre-set operating system, to our pilot teams. These hosts helped the teams get accustomed to the new OS, experiment with it, and enjoy the experience of discovering a modern operating system.

The core team also extended personalized, in-depth assistance to help internal partner teams develop compatible software packages and set up operating system components according to the unique needs of different applications. To prepare engineers for the transition to Azure Linux OS, we shared insights from the pilot programs during technical talks, team meetings and casual office conversations.

The transition significantly improved our deployment speed and system reliability, directly enhancing our ability to innovate and respond to market demands. The seamless integration with familiar tools boosted productivity, while extensive support from Azure Linux support team helped us minimize downtime. As a result, we’ve strengthened trust and confidence in our engineering capabilities across our organization, which helps us make the case for future technological advancements and gives us a competitive edge in our operations.

The company touts the “community-driven innovation” along with its relationship with Microsoft as keys to pulling off a successful migration.

The migration of LinkedIn’s fleet to Azure Linux was a strategic decision that entailed numerous considerations and challenges. Its successful execution yielded substantial benefits ranging from cost savings to enhanced security and flexibility. We achieved both critical goals: provide a modern, secure operating system to reliably serve LinkedIn members worldwide; and deliver innovative new AI-powered features to members faster.

By embracing open-source solutions, LinkedIn, in partnership with Microsoft, harnessed the power of community-driven innovation and unlocked new levels of efficiency, agility, and competitiveness. Nevertheless, careful planning, comprehensive training and ongoing support were essential to making the transition smooth and maximizing the long-term value of the migration.

LinkedIn’s entire blog post is very detailed, well worth a read, and provides valuable insights other companies can benefit from when planning a similar OS migration.