This article was originally published on February 02, 2021
Red Hat and CentOS Ecosystem Changes
EDB Products (All versions) on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS Linux
WHAT’S NEW
Red Hat and CentOS have announced several significant changes to the CentOS Linux roadmap that may affect your EDB deployments. This technical alert discusses various changes happening in the CentOS and Red Hat ecosystem and provides our response for each:
| Platform | Change | EDB Response |
| CentOS Linux 8 | Redhat and CentOS announced that the lifecycle of CentOS Linux 8 operating system has been cut short and CentOS Linux 8 – as a rebuild of RHEL 8 – will end December 2021. After this date, no further operating system updates will be available. [1][7] | EDB will adhere to the accelerated end of life for CentOS Linux 8 and provide its support until December 2021. CentOS Linux 8 should not be considered for use in production environments after this date and we strongly urge our users to plan their migrations proactively during this year to a supported platform. For any migration assistance, please reach out to us at customersuccess@enterprisedb.com. |
| CentOS Stream | RedHat revealed it would be shifting focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream is not a replacement for CentOS Linux; it tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release serving as its upstream (development) branch. [1][2][4] | The news around CentOS Stream is new and evolving. Red Hat mentions CentOS Stream as a “rolling preview” of RHEL and recommends that its customers use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for production deployments. EDB will continue to monitor progress and adoption around CentOS Stream and will provide more information by Q3 2021. |
| CentOS Linux 7 RHEL 7 RHEL 8 | No new changes.[3] | EDB expects to continue to support CentOS Linux 7, RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 through their life cycles. |
| CentOS Linux 6 | CentOS Linux 6 reached end of life (EOL) on November 30th, 2020. Updates and patches from the CentOS community are no longer available. [5] | EDB adheres to CentOS Linux 6 end of life and strongly urges its customers to migrate if they haven't already done so. EDB will not provide any further updates for its products on CentOS Linux 6. The relevant packages will be removed from EDB repositories on 1st April 2021. |
| RHEL 6 | RHEL 6 maintenance support 2 phase ended on 30th November 2020 and it has now entered its Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS).[3] | RedHat provides very limited support in its ELS (Critical and Important security fixes). While our strong recommendation would be to migrate from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7 or RHEL 8; should you have reasons to keep your EDB products on RHEL 6 in its ELS or require migration assistance, please reach out at customersuccess@enterprisedb.com. For RHEL 6 to a higher RHEL version upgrade, please be mindful of the collation differences which can lead to data/index corruption.[6] |
All future dates mentioned above are close approximations and subject to change.
TELL ME MORE
The following articles from partner sites provide more information around the changes mentioned above
[1] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/
[2] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/centos-stream-building-innovative-future-enterprise-linux
[3] https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata
[4] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates
[5] https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product
[6] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Collations
[7] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-programs-easier-ways-access-rhel
IS THIS ANNOUNCEMENT FOR ME?
This announcement is for EDB customers who have their EDB products deployed on one or more of
- CentOS Linux 8
- CentOS Linux 6
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
TROUBLESHOOTING
If you experience any problems around the installation, migration, upgrade or general use of your EDB software please contact our Technical Support teams. We can be reached at https://support.enterprisedb.com, but we’re also available 24 x 7 via email and phone at the details below:
Email: support@enterprisedb.com
Phone: US: +1-732-331-1320 or 1-800-235-5891
UK: +44-2033719820
Brazil: +55-2139581371
India: +91-20-66449612