Here is a surprise for long term CentOS users – CentOS Project confirmed that CentOS 8 support will be ending by December 2021.

Moreover, the CentOS Project announced that in the coming year’s CentOS Stream which is a midstream between Fedora Linux and RHEL will be the one where all development will be focused going forward.

Here at Bobcares, we have seen several such CentOS related queries as part of our Server Management Services for web hosts and online service providers.

Today, let’s discuss the major impacts of shifting focus to CentOS Stream

What is CentOS Stream

CentOS stream lies in-between Fedora and RHEL. In simple words, it will provide a “rolling preview” of future Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernels and features.

It will provide a clear vision of the next version of RHEL.

CentOS Stream Announcement

The future of the CentOS Project is CentOS Stream. Over the next year focus will be on CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release.

CentOS Stream will continue to serve as the upstream (development) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux after that date.

CentOS 7 will reach the end of support on December 2020. However, it is on an extended support period until June 2024.

CentOS Stream will be the centerpiece of a major shift in collaboration among the CentOS Special Interest Groups (SIGs). This ensures SIGs are developing and testing against what becomes the next version of RHEL.

When CentOS Linux 8 (the rebuild of RHEL8) ends, the best option will be to migrate to CentOS Stream 8. But this is a small delta from CentOS Linux 8 and has regular updates like traditional CentOS Linux releases.

If you are using CentOS Linux 8 in a production environment, and are concerned that CentOS Stream will not meet your needs. Then we would like to introduce certain plans that we support.

Control Panel Suitable operating system:

All other cases Ubuntu

Plans that we can suggest to you

1. As part of the cPanel migration plan, we can assist in migrating from cPanel to Plesk or cPanel to DirectAdmin.

2. Also, we can assist in migrating CentOS 8 to Ubuntu LTS.

3. Choosing CloudLinux

An announcement is already made about releasing a free, open-sourced, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL® 8 in the Q1 of 2021. So if you are using CentOS 8 – a new OS will be released that is similar to CentOS 8 based on RHEL 8 stable. Additionally, stable and well-tested updates will be provided until 2029 that is completely free.

Moreover, switching from CentOS would be quite easy which can be done by running a single command that switches repositories & keys.

[Are you affected by this change and would prefer an alternative? – We are here to help you.]

Conclusion

In today’s writeup, we discussed the CentOS Stream which was an announcement made by CentOS. However, this sudden move by Red Hat has obviously left many users awestruck.