In December 2020, the CentOS community and Red Hat announced the sunset of CentOS. Red Hat also announced CentOS Stream, a new, upstream development platform for the CentOS community. For more information, see Transforming the development experience within CentOS.
What does this mean for CentOS users?
CentOS 7 and 8 are the final releases of CentOS Linux. The end of support (EOS) dates for CentOS 7 and 8 are as follows:
- CentOS 8 - December 31, 2021
- CentOS 7 - June 30, 2024
If you have workloads that are running on these CentOS versions, you might want to review what options are available to you on Google Cloud and start migrating your workloads.
CentOS 7
As of June 30, 2024, the CentOS 7 operating system no longer receives software updates. For Google Cloud customers running CentOS 7, we recommend that you migrate your workloads to another operating system.
Long Term Support options
For maintaining your existing CentOS 7 systems on Google Cloud, there are long term support options from Google partners that provide secure packages, updates, and security patches to extend the lifetime of your CentOS environments. To receive CentOS technical support for your Google Cloud workloads, we recommend the following option:
- CIQ Bridge: Extends CentOS 7 support by up to 3 years. CIQ, the exclusive provider of enterprise Rocky Linux for Google Cloud, offers access to a global repository of CentOS 7 packages, security updates, and patches to maintain business continuity and regulated industries compliance. In partnership with Google, CIQ is committed to helping Google Cloud customers by providing promotional discounts for CentOS 7 long term support.
Migration options
You can choose to either migrate your workloads that are running on CentOS to a compatible OS distribution, or you might choose an OS that uses a different system.
To migrate your workloads, complete the following steps:
Decide on whether you want to move to a compatible OS or not.
- For a list of compatible operating systems, see CentOS compatible operating systems.
- For a list of other operating systems that you might consider, see Other operating systems.
To move from CentOS to the new OSes, you have the following options:
- Create a new VM with the new OS and redeploy your workloads. Google recommends using this option.
Migrate your workloads to a new OS using conversion tools. Choose one of the following:
- Use the migration tool that is available from the OS distribution that you want to migrate to. While a few community tools might be available for converting your workloads from CentOS to another distribution, Google Cloud does not provide or support any of these conversion tools.
- Use the
migrate2rockytool provided by CIQ to convert CentOS to Rocky Linux. For instructions on how to use this tool and the supported operating systems, see the Rocky Linux documentation. - Use the
Convert2RHELtool provided by Red Hat to convert CentOS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For instructions on how to use this tool and the supported operating systems, see the Convert2RHEL documentation.
Append the relevant OS license strings. For a list of OS license strings on Compute Engine, see Operating systems details. To append the license string, see Append and validate a user license.
CentOS compatible operating systems
The following table summarizes the list of CentOS compatible operating systems that you can migrate to on Google Cloud.
| Distribution | Image available on Google Cloud | Image license cost | Support models |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)* | Yes | Premium image pricing | Commercial support (provided by Google Cloud) |
| Rocky Linux | Yes | None | |
| Alma Linux | Yes | None | |
| CentOS Stream | Yes | None | Community support |
*RHEL on demand images are available on Google Cloud. We also support RHEL Cloud Access (BYOS) subscription based gold images. For more information about RHEL's Cloud Access program, see Red Hat Cloud Access.
Promotional offers from Red Hat
Red Hat in partnership with Google is committed to helping you migrate from CentOS to RHEL. To help with this migration, we are providing promotional offers to qualified customers subject to approval from Red Hat. If you are interested in learning more about the RHEL promotional offers, contact your Google Cloud account representative.
Promotional offers from CIQ for CentOS
In partnership with Google, CIQ is providing promotional discounts for long term support for all CentOS customers on Google Cloud. CIQ Bridge can help ensure your CentOS systems remain secure, compliant and fully operational for up to 3 years.
Other operating systems
If you do not require a CentOS compatible operating system, the following options are available.
| Distribution | Image available on Google Cloud | Image license cost | Support models |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu LTS | Yes | None | The following options are available: |
| Debian | Yes | None | Community support |
| OpenSUSE | Yes | None | Community support |
| Ubuntu Pro | Yes | Premium image pricing | Commercial support (Google Cloud) |
| SLES | Yes | Premium image pricing | Commercial support (Google Cloud) |
Using the CentOS Vault
As part of the CentOS deprecation, all content was removed from from the CentOS 7
repositories. If it is necessary to install new packages on an existing
CentOS 7 system, you can switch repositories from the supported
mirror.centos.org to the unsupported vault.centos.org.
To switch to the CentOS vault repositories, you can run the following command:
sed -i -e s/mirror.centos.org/vault.centos.org/g -e s/^#baseurl=/baseurl=/g -e s/^mirrorlist=/#mirrorlist=/g /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*.repo
You can also provide this command during VM creation by using a startup script.
For more information about the CentOS vault, see the CentOS vault readme.
What's next
- Learn more about images on Compute Engine.
- Learn more about the operating systems that are available on Compute Engine.