What Do I Do If CentOS Linux Is No Longer Maintained?

CentOS has planned to stop maintaining CentOS Linux. The cloud platform will stop providing CentOS Linux public images. This section describes the impacts and tells you how to address the situation.

Background

On December 8, 2020, CentOS announced its plan to stop maintaining CentOS Linux and launched CentOS Stream. For more information, see CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream.

CentOS Linux 8 ended on December 31, 2021, and CentOS Linux 7 will end on June 30, 2024. CentOS Linux 9 and later versions will not be released, and patches will no longer be updated.

Impacts

CenterOS Linux users will be affected as follows:

After December 31, 2021, CentOS Linux 8 users will not be able to obtain any maintenance or support services, including problem fixing and function updates.
After June 30, 2024, CentOS Linux 7 users will not be able to obtain any maintenance or support services, including problem fixing and function updates.

The cloud users will be affected as follows:

CentOS Linux 8 public images will continue for a certain time. ECSs created from CentOS Linux 8 images will not be affected, but the images will no longer be updated.
The cloud platform will synchronize with CentOS for the support of CentOS Linux. After December 31, 2021, support services will no longer be available for CentOS 8. The support for CentOS 7 will continue until June 30, 2024.

Solution

You can change the OS so that the services originally running in CentOS Linux can continue to run in other OSs.

For details about how to change to CentOS Stream or Rocky Linux, see "Instances > Managing ECSs > Changing the OS" in Elastic Cloud Server User Guide.

**Table 1** Precautions for changing an OS
Item	Precautions for Changing an OS
Data backup	Data in all partitions of the system disk will be cleared, so you are advised to back up the system disk data prior to an OS change. Data in data disks remains unchanged.
Custom settings	After the OS is changed, custom settings such as DNS and hostname will be reset and need to be reconfigured.

**Table 2** Available OSs
OS	Description	Intended User
CentOS Stream	CentOS Stream is a continuous delivery distribution provided by CentOS.	Individuals or enterprises that are used to CentOS and desire continuous updates
Rocky Linux	Rocky Linux is a community-driven enterprise-class OS. It is a downstream release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Rocky Linux is fully compatible with and as stable as CentOS.	Individuals or enterprises that want to continue to use free images in an open source community
Debian and Ubuntu	They are Linux distributions that differ in use and compatibilities.	Individuals or enterprises that can afford the OS change costs