Red Hat Has Finally Given CentOS 7 a Cloud Upgrade Plan
BOSTON — CentOS Linux 7, the community-supported distribution derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), is set to reach its end-of-life (EOL) on June 30, 2024. After this date, systems running CentOS Linux 7 will cease to receive software updates and security patches. What to do? Well, you can switch to one of the RHEL clones, such as AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux, but while that works with servers, on the cloud it’s a different story. There’s no good way to cleanly migrate from CentOS 7 to any other operating system on the clouds, until now.
Why? Well, as Gunnar Hellekson, RHEL’s vice president and general manager, explained at Red Hat Summit 2023 “It’s actually very difficult to migrate. Read the documentation. It’ll say, in order to move from CentOS to something else, you have to shut the machine down and destroy it and create a new server with your new operating system.” That’s not acceptable.
So, Hellekson continued, “What we’ve done is work together and develop a mechanism, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Third-Party Linux Migration. This gives you the tooling and best practices you need for in-place conversion to RHEL 7.”
2 Additional Years
This Linux distro extends your software life for at least two additional years. Once you’re on RHEL 7, it’s much easier to update to the RHEL 8 or 9 families with the Leapp shell tool.
If you need help getting up to speed on RHEL, Red Hat wants you to know that your organization may also qualify for a no-cost subscription of RHEL for certain development use cases via the Red Hat Developer Subscription for Teams. With this, you can gain the knowledge and wherewithal to preserve your infrastructure investments while gaining additional time to plan your RHEL upgrade.
When it becomes available, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Third Party Linux Migration can be purchased through Red Hat’s sales teams, partners, the Red Hat website, and numerous cloud providers.
Top Clouds
All three of the top clouds, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google are supporting this move. Jeremy Winter, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Azure program management, was echoed by the others when he said, “Microsoft is focused on streamlining customers’ IT migrations and operations. As part of our continued partnership with Red Hat, including Azure-hosted Red Hat infrastructure, the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Third Party Linux Migration will be available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Our offer includes access to an additional two years of updates and patches to enable CentOS Linux 7 customers to more easily migrate to RHEL 7 and maintain continuity past June 30, 2024, EOL date with a supported and highly secure Linux distribution.”
If you absolutely can’t move from CentOS 7, there are third-party support options. These include TuxCare’s CentOS 7 End of Life Extended Lifecycle Support, which offers three more years of support, and OpenLogic CentOS 7 support, which offers five additional years of support.
