Previously, CentOS was downstream and inherited the latest stable version from RHEL.

Going forward, CentOS will be upstream of RHEL, meaning that CentOS users will essentially perform beta testing for new RHEL versions.

Support for version 8 will end in 2024 as originally scheduled.

The latest release of CentOS, version 9, will end support at the end of 2021, which is significantly shorter than the 10-year timeline Red Hat had previously promised.The company later announced that in light of the IBM acquisition of Red Hat, it decided to end support for CentOS. For example, a prominent user of CentOS is Facebook, which runs it on most of its servers. It was originally released in 2004 and was in wide use until recently. What Happened to CentOS and Why Is the Community Migrating to Rocky Linux?Ĭommunity Enterprise Operating System ( CentOS) was an open source Linux distribution designed to be fully compatible, but independent, from RHEL. What Happened to CentOS and Why Is the Community Migrating to Rocky Linux?.This is part of our series of articles about DevSecOps. Former CentOS co-founder, Gregory Kurtzer, is leading the Rocky Linux project, and maintainers of Rocky Linux provide easy, automated paths for migrating from CentOS to Rocky Linux. Many in the Linux community consider Rocky Linux the replacement for CentOS.

In 2021, Red Hat discontinued CentOS, a popular RHEL-compatible operating system, forcing its users to seek alternatives. It was developed by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation and was made generally available on June 21, 2021. It offers a downstream, binary-compatible release for production-grade RHEL with community support. Rocky Linux is an open source Linux distribution that supports the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system source code.

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