This fall has been a major step for GoFAST, the sovereign alternative to Microsoft Teams/Sharepoint, with the production launch of version 4.3. Why is this version so special? It marks the replacement of 2 technological offers "massacred" by 2 major American technology groups, IBM/RedHat on one side, and Broadcom/VMWare on the other.
On one hand, RedHat, acquired by IBM, announced that it would stop CentOS 7, the open-source derivative of its RedHat operating system, by the end of June 2024, even though this distribution is widely used in datacenters worldwide.
On the other hand, VMWare, freshly acquired by Broadcom, massively increased its prices (x4) and stopped distributing its free hypervisor ESXi, which could cost billions in France.
The connection with GoFAST? Well, as you may have guessed, these are technologies that we were using.
Replacing CentOS
Upon RedHat's announcement, the open-source community mobilized and decided to create 2 new distributions, Almalinux and RockyLinux, in addition to Oracle Linux, which has been available for years. All of these distributions guarantee compatibility with RedHat.
CEO-Vision followed and studied these various alternatives for months with numerous criteria such as:
- the size of the community
- the speed of security patch releases
- compatibility with our vulnerability scanning tools (Tenable)
- availability of security profiles like OpenSCAP, including ANSSI and U.S. driven profiles (CIS, etc.)
- etc...
This was followed by numerous tests and the release of a GoFAST Almalinux version. We took the opportunity to make the new operating system compliant with the "ANSSI BP 28 Enhanced" security profile, which was ultimately included in version 4.3.
Replacing VMWare
GoFAST can be operated on-premise or on dedicated SaaS. For some managed service providers, we are also responsible for the hypervisor layer, and like many others, we were using VMWare ESXi.
For our internal systems, we had gradually migrated to Proxmox, a solution based on the open-source KVM hypervisor. This allowed us to have experience with a technology other than VMWare just in case.
Even if hypervisors will become less strategic in the long term with new containerized architectures, they are currently crucial for datacenter virtualization, which is almost everything!
CEO-Vision's production version 4.3 of GoFAST has therefore switched from VMWare ESXi to Proxmox.
Finally, version 4.3 of GoFAST is ready for containerization, allowing it to eventually break free from the hypervisor layer to run in Kubernetes, OpenShift, or Rancher.
Conclusion
All of these changes were time-consuming for CEO-Vision but necessary to break free from the lock-in of these IT giants in a near-monopoly situation, who can impose any decisions they want (prices, products, services, etc.).
Our GoFAST clients' CIOs have had no worries, no investments, no risks, we have done everything for them.
Finally, the golden rule for a CIO is to never rely on a single technology. Even an organization still fully Microsoft should have at least its sensitive data and essential documents on a platform like GoFAST, allowing for complete Disaster Recovery independence, data protection, and an alternative solution to lock-in.