Week in Review: End of Life Planning for CentOS Linux
Readers come to The New Stack (and, yes, other tech publications) to find out what’s new. But sometimes, we also tell them what’s old – and is about to become obsolete. Such was the case this past week when we published a story about CentOS Linux, the operating system widely used by enterprise-level and government IT teams.
At the end of 2020, Red Hat announced it was ending support for CentOS. That drop-dead deadline is right about (*checks watch*) now. The TNS article, by Gregory M. Kurtzer, sounded the alarm for CentOS users who might have either forgotten about Red Hat’s end-of-life (EOL) announcement or lost track of time.
Kurtzer offered empathy for readers who haven’t moved off of CentOS yet, despite four years’ advance warning. "There are some legitimate reasons why organizations might still need to complete their migration,” he wrote, including budgetary limits, lack of personnel, lack of qualified stacks that meet compliance rules and underestimating the lift involved.
Also, leadership that’s jittery about risk could be holding organizations from making moves, he suggested: “In some cases, CIOs have opted to wait until the last minute to ensure they really have to migrate off of CentOS. When you’re talking about moving thousands of servers during a process that will take over a year, this conservative approach is certainly understandable, even if it has resulted in stress as EOL approaches.”
If you do find yourself still on CentOS as the clock burns down, the author also offered the kind of practical problem-solving that readers come to TNS for – suggesting users find an extension-of-life plan for CentOS 7 as a bridge to one of its replacements, like Rocky Linux. (He created both CentOS and Rocky.)
Kurtzer’s story is part of our expanded TNS contributor program, helmed by our colleague Matt Burns. We’re eager to showcase best practices and astute analysis of the at-scale software landscape through this program. If you’ve got ideas to pitch that you think TNS readers would appreciate, here’s how to get started.
— Heather Joslyn, editor-in-chief, TNS
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