What is CentOS End Of Life (EOL)?

CentOS was created as a part of the CentOS project by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In the year 2004, it was first released in the software market. It is a community-driven free software project built to provide a robust platform for the open source communities to grow. CentOS is also a development environment for most hosting communities, cloud providers, scientific data processing, etc. The developers of CentOS collaborate with several upstream communities to help them distribute and layer their software conclusively on a stable platform.

CentOS allows you to develop in one of the best and most potent available distributions. It is highly adaptable, as well as safe and robust. It features several corporate-level security updates that declare it an excellent choice for any user. In the following year, the objective of the CentOS developers is to build CentOS Linux as a ruling community platform for expanding the new open source technologies from other projects such as OpenStack.

CentOS Project:

This Project comprises a group that is responsible for the maintenance of the CentOS development framework. It operates more than an operating system and issues resources to help other organizations develop CentOS-based technologies. Furthermore, this Project aspires to make CentOS Linux a premier community platform for developing new open source technologies from other projects.

Advantages of CentOS:

Here are some of the benefits of utilizing it:

• It is fast, dependable, and lightweight.
• It is freely available, open-source, and enterprise-ready.
• In addition, you’ll get version control tools like git, which are all pre-installed, also open-source server software like MySQL, CUPS, Apache Web.
• It also provides excellent community support, including the ability to submit bugs directly to bugs.centos.org.
• The most recent CentOS version incorporates virtualization technology and hypervisor such as Xen, oVirt, and Docker.
• CentOS distro provides the same features as the commercial RHEL. This distribution is accessible for no cost!
• Compared to other freely available, open-source Linux distributions, CentOS is widely favored because of its reliability and fewer package upgrades.

RHEL and CentOS:

CentOS is a commercial Linux distribution based on the RHEL source code and is supported by the community. Because Red Hat builds their product using open source software, that’s the reason they have to make their source code public. Subsequently, CentOS and RHEL are functionally equivalent, with the main differences being the removal of vendor artwork and branding.

On the other hand, CentOS lacks Red Hat certifications because it is based only on its source code. The CentOS project uses the Red Hat publicly available source packages to produce binary packages, which anybody can use for free. Still, specific updates are not made public; there may exist some variations between the packages delivered by CentOS and Red Hat.

Red Hat has supported the CentOS project since 2014 to assist open source developers in developing a suitable platform that utilizes CentOS to integrate technologies. In the same year, CentOS and Red Hat developers formed the Governing Board, which various working groups now supervise. This Governing Board is made up of CentOS project founders as well as Red Hat employees.

CentOS latest releases:

We have CentOS 7, CentOS 8, and CentOS Stream to talk about CentOS’s latest releases. In 2019, when CentOS 8 was introduced, many people wondered what had changed significantly from CentOS 7. Now, we will figure out the contrast between these two CentOS versions. Let’s get to the bottom of this mystery and check out if CentOS 8 is worthy of trying out or not.

CentOS 7 was the first RHEL distribution to include “systemd” as a standard feature. CentOS 7 was released in 2014 and offered several features that have assisted the community well over the past ten years.

With the CentOS 8 End of Life (EOL) announcement in December 2021, the operating system’s life cycle has been reduced short. RHEL declared that their team would concentrate on CentOS Stream in the future.

CentOS stream:

A Linux development platform that allows Red Hat developers to collaborate with the open-source community members is CentOS Stream. Red Hat develops the RHEL source code in CentOS Stream. Therefore, it is considered as a part of the open-source development model. This model’s implementation makes CentOS Stream a preview of the future releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Advantages of CentOS Stream:

• It is not much different from CentOS.
• It extracts new features before the RHEL distribution.
• It has the potential of having a great development community.
• This development platform is more agile than the previous one.

Timeline of CentOS versions :

Red Hat published the following timeline for the CentOS distribution on December 20, 2020:

• There will be no CentOS Linux 9.
• The CentOS Linux 6 distribution’s updates will terminate on November 30, 2020.
• Red Hat will support the CentOS Linux version 7 till the date: June 30, 2024.
• Till December 31, 2021, CentOS will get support from the Red Hat team.
• The CentOS Stream 8 distribution will continue to get updates throughout the RHEL support term.
• In the second quarter of 2021, CentOS Stream 9 will be released.

End Of Life (EOL) of Current CentOS versions:

Conclusion:

CentOS offers a community-driven free software project built to provide a robust platform for the open source communities to grow. It also provides a development environment for most hosting communities, cloud providers, scientific data processing, etc. In this post, we have delivered the information related to CentOS. We have also provided you the details about the End of Life (EOL) schedule and timelines for the current versions.