What Questions Do You Have About Your Enterprise Linux?
Recent changes within the Enterprise Linux landscape, including the abbreviated CentOS 8 community support schedule, have left many enterprises asking questions about their path forward with Enterprise Linux.
Should they stay on their current OS version? Migrate to an alternative? How can they avoid instability going forward?
Planning for What’s Next
If your team is asking these same questions, OpenLogic is here to help.
Whether that means supporting your Enterprise Linux distribution beyond community support EOL, transitioning to another distribution, or just setting a contingency plan, we'll provide vendor neutral recommendations tailored to your business needs.
During your free, one-hour consulting session, our experts will discuss:
- Your current infrastructure: complexity, upgrade cadence, resource availability, and business goals
- Options for ongoing support and/or migration
- Recommendations for ongoing stability and reliability
Ready to set up your session? Fill out the form to get started.
Frequently Asked Questions
We understand that the announcement has taken many businesses by surprise. However, no decisions or changes need to happen immediately. You have time. Whatever version you are on now, you can get ongoing support and builds through OpenLogic by Perforce, including the Linux CentOS 8 release (see timelines below).
Going forward, the choice to stay with CentOS, move to CentOS Stream, or migrate to another distribution is entirely up to your business goals, release schedules, etc. Perforce and the OpenLogic team have extensive experience helping customers run enterprise open source at scale, with a proven track record of support, consulting, and migrations. Please consider us a trusted advisor in your decision-making process.
OpenLogic has been following the announcement and CentOS Stream preview since the original implementation. While we understand that this decision may be disruptive to some, we liken it to the decision many software communities have made to shift to more rapid release and continuous delivery patterns, such as the shift to six-month major releases of Java.
Running package upgrades against the public CentOS Stream will result in multiple package updates per day and may open the user to non-stable builds of supporting Linux packages. Businesses who rely on the CentOS community to curate stable package versions will need to consider this in their test plans.
If you choose to continue to adopt CentOS Stream, in general, the less continually you currently deliver your software, the more risk you will incur at release time.
The changes will take effect as shown in the chart below. As you can see by the dates listed, customers do not need to make an immediate decision. You have plenty of time to decide the right choice for your business going forward.
| Version | Community Support | Support via OpenLogic |
CentOS 6 | EOL November, 2020 | EOL support available until December, 2025 |
CentOS 7 | EOL June, 2024 | Support available now, EOL support available until December, 2029 |
CentOS 8 | EOL December, 2021 (originally December, 2029) | Support available now, EOL support available until 2026 |
For additional information, please contact your Perforce account manager or email us at info@perforce.com.
Need more information on the differences between CentOS Stream vs CentOS Linux? Have other questions about available options? Please contact us today via the form on this page.