CentOS end of support guidance


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.

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:

  1. Decide on whether you want to move to a compatible OS or not.

  2. 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 migrate2rocky tool 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 Convert2RHEL tool 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.
  3. 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.

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)

What's next

  • Learn more about images on Compute Engine.
  • Learn more about the operating systems that are available on Compute Engine.