CentOS 8 has abruptly been shifted to EOL in 2021. Now what?

[ArtorisKing]

To start with, I expect that the cPanel folks will not have an immediate, or even within the month, answer -- I imagine you are as caught off-guard as we are -- and part of my motivation to post is warning other cPanel users of this occurrence.

Now that CentOS has focused on Stream and revised the EOL date for CentOS 8 back almost eight years, from May 2029 to December 2021, what will the upgrade path be once CentOS 7 goes EOL in 2024?

I'll admit I went with going to CentOS 7 from 6 in November after holding out, since I needed to be production-ready. I wasn't happy about that, but now I feel like I dodged a bullet.

 

[cPRex]

This announcement is pretty great, huh? I don't have anything official just yet as we didn't get any additional notice on our end. I imagine there will be some major announcements once we have a plan.

 

[WebJIVE]

This could be Centos shooting themselves in the foot for being the standard-bearer for hosting.

 

[VIRTBIZ CHRIS]

This is obviously a breaking situation. I don't expect "the answer" right now, but I do hope that cPanel will be transparent and collaborative in communicating what it (the company) sees as the way forward. Sysadmins around the world are going to have their work cut out for them.

And here I was thinking that cPanel had been dragging their feet on CentOS 8 as a way to nudge users to CloudLinux... maybe they saw the writing on the wall.

 

[yakatz9]

cPanel on Ubuntu? (I know it isn't going to happen, but basically all our other servers are Ubuntu...)

 

[Bretas]

It would be way simpler for cPanel to switch to Oracle Linux than anything else. Oracle has a conversion script for CentOS 6 and 7 and they are certainly rushing to push one for 8.

cPanel already builds several of its packages anyway, so maybe they will just roll their own stable distro on top of CentOS Stream's BaseOS at least for the next few years until RHEL 9 starts taking shape. Time will tell.

I really wonder what will happen to CloudLinux 8 though.

 

[ciao70]

FAQ: CentOS Stream Updates

An FAQ for inquiries around the updates to CentOS Stream from Red Hat.

www.redhat.com

On December 8, 2020, we are announcing this timeline for CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream sponsorship by Red Hat:

• There will not be a CentOS Linux 9.
• Updates for the CentOS Linux 8 distribution continue until December 31, 2021.
• Updates for the CentOS Linux 7 distribution continue as before until June 30, 2024.
• Updates for the CentOS Linux 6 distribution ended November 30, 2020.
• CentOS Stream 9 will launch in Q2 2021 as part of the RHEL 9 development process.
• Updates for the CentOS Stream 8 distribution continue through the full RHEL support phase.

 

[ciao70]

FAQ - CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

www.centos.org

 

[ffeingol]

Not that it will prob. go anywhere, but can't hurt: Sign the Petition

 

[JIKOmetrix]

No official reply from cPanel on this yet?

 

[cPRex]

@JIKOmetrix - I posted everything we know so far earlier in this thread. That's all we've got at this point.

 

[mctDarren]

I just read the plan for Stream 8 is first to get new test packages, last to get security updates after fully tested across RHEL? Yikes. Are they trying to force CentOS out of production environments completely?

 

[CloudLinux Skhristich]

I really wonder what will happen to CloudLinux 8 though.

Hello,
We are aware of these changes and are currently discussing them internally with the team. We will provide information soon on our blog here https://blog.cloudlinux.com/
We understand that this is important for our clients and are looking for the best solution. Thank you.

 

[VIRTBIZ CHRIS]

Are they trying to force CentOS out of production environments completely?

Yes. That's exactly it. Their case is that if you want a stable, secure Enterprise Linux environment, pony up for RHEL. The cost is well worth it.

That's their argument. Mine may differ.

 

[John C. Reid]

It might be time to reconsider this:

https://twitter.com/cpanel/status/917818017421168640?lang=en

 

[vacancy]

It might be time to reconsider this:

https://twitter.com/cpanel/status/917818017421168640?lang=en

freebsd is a terrible operating system.

I would continue with centos stream instead of using freebsd.

My servers are still working on centos 7, since support for centos 7 will continue until 2024, i will continue my plans on centos 7, i hope cpanel will support centos 7 until 2024. Centos 8 was born dead and there is no need to work on it.

 

[John C. Reid]

Two problems with your statement. First FreeBSD is not the only BSD Distro based on Berkley Unix. So you are making a undefendable blanket statement. Second, you provided zero to backup your statement. I would argue that ZFS alone make it more suitable for many servers than any Linux distro out there. You are throwing the baby out with the bath water based on a chosen kernel alone.

 

[yakatz9]

It would be way simpler for cPanel to switch to Oracle Linux than anything else. Oracle has a conversion script for CentOS 6 and 7 and they are certainly rushing to push one for 8.

Not a great solution for a lot of people. For an extreme example, a company I deal with regularly (50,000+ users) received threats from Oracle to sue them for misusing Java and VirtualBox. Neither allegation was true, but the company lawyers announced that they had to block all Oracle products to prevent potential future legal issues.

 

[Bretas]

Not a great solution for a lot of people. For an extreme example, a company I deal with regularly (50,000+ users) received threats from Oracle to sue them for misusing Java and VirtualBox. Neither allegation was true, but the company lawyers announced that they had to block all Oracle products to prevent potential future legal issues.

Sure, personally I wouldn't touch anything Oracle with a 10 foot pole either. It would all boil down to some sort of permissive agreement between cPanel and those people.

Anyway, according to Igor's post on WHT it looks like CloudLinux managed to make lemonade out of this situation. Good opportunity for cPanel do drop CentOS and finally marry CloudLinux.

My name is Igor Seletskiy. I am CEO/Founder of Cloud Linux Inc.

CloudLinux OS has never depended on CentOS®. Our software was and continues to be a fork of RedHat® EL. We base our packages on sources provided by RedHat®.
As such, we don't expect any changes for CloudLinux OS due to the RedHat® announcement.

As we already maintain CloudLinux OS, we plan to release a free, open sourced, community driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL® 8 (and future releases) in the Q1 of 2021. We will create a separate, totally free OS that is fully binary compatible with RHEL® 8 (and future versions). We will sponsor the development & maintenance of such OS. We will work on establishing a community around the OS, with the governing board from members of the community.

Why we are doing it:
We have all the infrastructure, software and experience to do that already. We have a large staff of developers and maintainers that have a decade of experience in building a RHEL fork, starting from RHEL5 to RHEL8
We expect that this project will put us on the map, and allow people to discover our rebootless update software (https://kernelcare.com) and LTS offering https://www.cloudlinux.com/extended-lifecycle

What will we do to make sure that we don't go wrong:
We plan to make all the build and test software free, open sourced, easy to set up, so if we ever go in the wrong direction - the community can just pick up where we left off.

What it means for you:
If you are running CloudLinux OS 8 -- it will continue to have stable and well tested updates until 2029, and ELS releases for years after that.

If you are running CentOS 8 - we will release an OS very similar to CentOS 8 based on RHEL 8 stable. We will provide stable and well tested updates until 2029 - totally free. You will be able to convert from CentOS 8 at any moment by running a single command that switches repositories & keys.

Timeline: Q1 2021

SOURCE: Page 3 | The end of CentOS | Web Hosting Talk

 

[kawasakai]

The creator of CentOS is planning something new: Meet Rocky Linux: New RHEL Fork by the Original CentOS Creator