CentOS team is no longer developing new releases under the community support project and the entire team will continue to focus on 

 the final update as per CentOS official website is that they will extend Zero-Day support till the end of January 31st, 2022 after that, it’s all over for CentOS Linux.

Community Enterprise Operating System (CentOS) is a free open-source Linux distribution, which is functionally compatible with the licensed version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), meaning CentOS Linux aims to be a clone of RHEL and the main difference is packages are removed upstream vendor branding and artworks. CentOS Linux distribution is a stable, predictable, and easily manageable platform used in emerging areas such as Cloud providers, Container hosting, Application development, and scientific data processing, etc. since this has been so popular because of active community support and stability in the platform most of the public-facing servers are adopted CentOS Linux as a base operating system. So far, there have been six major versions released by Red Hat on the CentOS platform starting from the year 2004 until the latest release of CentOS 8 in the year 2019, and no further development. However, the CentOS governing board decided to extend support for 

. CentOS Community will continue to contribute in collaborating with open-source Linux distribution as part of CentOS Stream, which will continue being an important part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux development process, this does not mean that you can switch to CentOS Stream. Moreover, CentOS Stream is DevOps friendly considering Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Linux, but it is not an enterprise-ready operating system.

Red Hat will continue to maintain source code in public Git 

 for everybody’s use but there would not be any build for CentOS 8 from Red Hat. Now companies need to find an alternative Linux distribution with long-term support. Here are a few alternatives we will discuss.

The news that CentOS Linux 8 has discontinued in December 2021 has disturbed many customers and their IT strategies, now it is a big question among the CentOS users that what are all the alternative options are available and how to select the right operating system for the current workload ?.  Here we are doing some deep dive to understand the core features of alternative Linux distribution and end of this blog you may have some fair idea as to how to select your alternative for CentOS Linux.


1)	Alma Linux
2)	Rocky Linux
3)	Amazon Linux
4)	Oracle Linux
5)	Ubuntu

Alma Linux is a community-driven open source Linux operating system that fills the void left by the demise of the CentOS Linux stable release; it is a 1:1 binary compatible version of RHEL. Meaning users are not required to pay for RHEL license and AlmaLinux's latest version 

, is an exact copy of RHEL 8.5, users can enjoy long time community support and if you really required vendor like support, you may consult with Care service.

The AlmaLinux Foundation is a non-profit created for the benefit of the Alma Linux OS community and it has been backed by Cloud Linux, AWS, Microsoft Azure, cPanel and few other companies. Alma Linux is also working on the open source Elevate project, which aims to make migration from RHEL 7.x to RHEL 8.x as simple as possible. This approach is based on RedHat’s Leap framework and it is currently supported for migrating from CentOS 7 to Alma Linux 8, CentOS Stream8, Oracle Linux 8, and finally supported for Rocky Linux 8 as well. Since technology is currently under development, we strongly advise you to test migration scenarios in a VM or sandbox before conducting a migration in production to avoid surprises.

Former CentOS founder Gregory Kurtzer introduced rocky Linux since after Red Hat announced they would discontinue development of CentOS on December 2020. Rocky Linux is a distribution based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system source code that is intended to be a downstream, fully binary compatible version. The project's goal is to create a community-supported, production-grade business operating system. The name Rocky was chosen as a homage to Rocky McGaugh, an early CentOS co-founder. Rocky Linux's code repository has made it to the top of GitHub's trending list by December 12.

Rocky Linux is an open-source and free, community-based server operating system, which is an exact rebuild of RHEL. For instance, RHEL 8.5 was released on 9th November 2021, and Rocky Linux follows the footprint of RHEL and released its Rocky Linux 8.5 on 15th November 2021 just a few days after the Red Hat release. It is a production-ready solid operating system and supported for 10 years lifecycle at zero cost, now you can give try using easy migration scripts to move from Enterprise Linux distributions to Rocky Linux.

AWS has introduced next-generation Amazon Linux using Fedora upstream, considering more on security, stability, and high-performance execution environment to develop and run cloud applications. AL2022 will provide frequent updates every quarter, and you can expect major releases every 2 years, and each major release will come with five years of LTS (long time support). It also comes pre-installed with many AWS API tools and 

, where you can interact with OS image via Amazon EC2 user data field and let you to remotely configured EC2 instances.

If you are running EC2 CentOS images in AWS cloud, you probable look at Amazon Linux 3.0 as an alternative it will work better at low costing. 


Oracle Linux is completely free with optional support available since 2006 and they committed to maintaining the same model.  Oracle Linux is specifically architected to be 100% application binary compatible with RHEL and CentOS Linux and there has not been a single recorded bug relating to compatibility issues since the release date. The advantage of using Oracle Linux is that there have been very good performance enhancements in UEK (Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel) for running Oracle database workload. If you are running, Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS with Oracle database, you can explore Oracle Linux as an alternative option.

Oracle promises to keep Oracle Linux , source code, and binaries will remain free of cost, and if you are looking for a vendor support you may consult pricing detail in the following link. 

Ubuntu Linux distribution is developed based on Debian and it is open-source, free to use, modify and redistribute however you like to, but when you ask whether this is an alternative to CentOS? The answer is NO! Both run on a different platform. As explained above, CentOS is based on the Red Hat RMP binary operating system whereas Ubuntu is Debian-based. If your organization can invest some time to make small changes around your application and port to Ubuntu Linux then, nothing like it. It is definitely a better option.  The advantage of Ubuntu is you may find a lot of documentation and community support for every critical bug/issue, which made Ubuntu very solid and famous.  

If your team has potential experience in managing yourUbuntu platform for a decade then I don’t think you would need paid support, however if you like to use so then you may try this link.  

In this article, we tried our best to describe various alternative options are available for migrating your obsolete CentOS 7 & 8 to alternative Linux distribution. Nevertheless, we cannot make any recommendations out there since you may be having various dependencies with your applications. however if you are using Zybisys Cloud Services to host your CentOS-based applications you can reach out to our support team for consultation and based on the recommendations support team will upgrade/migrate your current running CentOS platform to a suitable alternative Linux OS without impacting your application and your business. For other users who are, not using Zybisys Cloud Services by now you would have some far idea how to deal your current situation.  

CentOS is End of Life, Now What is Next….?

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