CentOS is dead

Centos logo vertical

In 2018 Redhat had already caused quite a bit of nervousness and hassle in the IAM community following its decision to remove OpenLDAP from its distribution. This withdrawal was motivated by the desire to force users to upgrade to its paid version at $ 41,000 per year. This painful episode is well told by symas the creators of OpenLDAP.

This was followed by the demise of the net-perl-ldap libraries and the intense debate led by the user and developer community to force Redhat to put these libraries back into Redhat 8.

Today we can honestly say that confidence is totally lost in Redhat and CentOS with the announcement of the discontinuation of support for CentOS 8 in 2021.

Indeed, when Centos 8 was released, a 10-year support period in maintenance update until 2029 and full update until 2024, which is perfectly visible on the internet archive of the wiki Centos dated September 28, 2020.

The blog post of 8 decembre 2020 announces the end of Centos 8 for the end of 2021 and leaves as the only update path to switch to Centos steam which will be a development version not dedicated to production and with no guarantee. As the blog post says :

At the end of CentOS Linux 8 (the rebuild of RHEL8), your best option will be to migrate to CentOS Stream 8, which is a small delta of CentOS Linux 8, and has regular updates like traditional versions of CentOS Linux. If you are using CentOS Linux 8 in a production environment and are concerned that CentOS Stream may not meet your needs, we encourage you to contact Red Hat about the options.

That is to say that, because of CentOS 8 overshadows RHEL 8, they are destroying it.

This is very bad news that gives very bad signals after the acquisition of Redhat by IBM.

We will continue to support all customers on CentOS 7, but CentOS 8 will not see a version of FusionDirectory.

we will still continue to recommend the use of Debian in all infrastructure, the only community distribution to have stood the test of time and known for its reliability and durability.