Today I want to announce the publication of an article that marks an important milestone in my career: ELevate to the Future. What makes this article different from the others I have written is that this one is an sponsored piece.
I am sure magazine readers are already familiar with sponsored articles, which are born when an external company pays the author to write about something the company cares about, under a positive light. Sponsored articles have a bad reputation because, if a for-profit company is calling the shots and paying the author to write good things about a product or service, how can the resulting article be trustworthy? Sponsored articles are a challenge to write because you need to write the truth, but you cannot be negative towards the sponsor.
The article deals with ELevate, a tool from the Alma Linux people which is designed to make migrating away from CentOS painless and easy. It also doubles up as an upgrade tool, compatible with the usual Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones. The article itself is available for free. ELevate is interesting because Red Hat derived distributions have traditionally been a pain to upgrade. Besides, CentOS is a sinking ship and many System Administrators need a plan out. I think using ELevate to migrate away from CentOS to Alma Linux is a reasonable proposition.
The biggest roadblock in writing this article was that ELevate was incapable of upgrading or migrating systems which used unofficial repositories, such as EPEL. This lack of core functionality is the sort of thing that must be mentioned in an honest article, but is hard to put in a sponsored piece because it makes the sponsor look bad, so I opted to include some workaround about the issue. Thankfully, the sponsor noticed this and decided to fix the issues on their end to EPEL was supported by ELevate and no negative points had to be raised by Linux Magazine. I think this speaks well about the professionalism of the people behind ELevate.