In December last year we communicated on the Red Hat announcement about CentOS Stream and the end of support of CentOS Linux 8 as of December 31, 2021. This Red Hat announcement generated a tsunami in the open source community about the sustainability of the CentOS distribution.
In a nutshell, Red Hat policy is now as follows:
- Fedora is the sandbox for testing the future big novelties that will be available in RHEL.
- CentOS becomes the sandbox for testing the stability of software updates and associated dependencies.
- RHEL remains the reference distribution for production platforms.
At Centreon, we’ve been loyal supporters of the CentOS distribution for more than a decade and we were planning on packaging our software platform for CentOS Linux 8 for the years to come. We obviously changed plans!
Today we want to share with you what this new Red Hat policy will change for the packaging and support of the Centreon Platform in future software releases.
We will continue to support CentOS Linux 7 in the future
Red Hat announced that the end of support of CentOS Linux 7 is scheduled for the end of 2024. We will thus continue to deliver the Centreon Platform open source and commercial editions on the CentOS Linux 7 distribution for the next few years.
If you’re running your Centreon on CentOS Linux 7, you can keep doing so and you will be able to update to future versions such as 21.04 and 21.10 released in April and October this year.
We will also support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 packaging
If you’re a Red Hat customer, you may also upgrade your Centreon Platform to an Enterprise Linux 8 (el8) operating system. We will continue to deliver future Centreon open source and commercial editions with an el8 packaging in parallel to the CentOS Linux 7 packaging.
Our latest version, Centreon 20.10, is already available with el8 packaging. Our online documentation describes the installation of Centreon for RHEL Linux in version 8.
Please note that this el8 packaging can come handy in some other situations:
- Red Hat announced a new program to provide free Enterprise Linux distributions, entitled to all updates, for production platforms smaller than 16 servers or for testing platforms. More announcements about free programs will come from Red Hat all along 2021.
- And Oracle Linux 8 is an alternative for use in production environments, with or without support from Oracle, benefiting from updates, based on RHEL foundation.
We will extend our Linux packaging to other distributions
This Red Hat announcement maybe was a blessing in disguise, triggering our willingness to extend our packaging to more Linux distributions.
Later this year, we’ll invest time and resources to package Centreon for Debian and Debian-compatible environments such as Ubuntu LTS.
We’ll start by creating Debian packages (*.deb) for the open source edition. We may ask the community to help us test these packages.
Next year, we’ll work on delivering Debian packages for our commercial editions. This will happen in parallel with delivering CentOS 7 and RHEL 8 packages: our plan is to support both environments.
We hope this information removes all uncertainty
Two months after Red Hat announcement our strategy is clear: supporting both CentOS Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 or compatible versions while extending our reach towards the Debian community.
We hope this removes all uncertainty on your side. Any comments or questions? Please contact us or participate in this GitHub discussion.
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