Industry & Technology
CentOS Linux 7 Reached End of Life in 2024
CentOS Linux 7 — the last version of CentOS Linux, as distinct from the rolling CentOS Stream — reached its official end of life on June 30, 2024. CentOS 8 had already stopped receiving updates at the end of 2021. For operators who had not already migrated, that closed the door on new security patches for any CentOS Linux release.
Why CentOS Went Away
Red Hat shifted its focus to CentOS Stream, a rolling-release development platform that sits upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux rather than downstream of it. That left a gap for anyone who wanted the stability of a traditional, RHEL-compatible point release — which is the gap AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux were built to fill.
The Two Main Successors
- Rocky Linux, founded by one of the original CentOS founders, positions itself as a strict, community-governed rebuild of RHEL
- AlmaLinux, backed by CloudLinux, follows a similar 1:1 binary compatibility approach with RHEL
Both are viable, actively maintained replacements, and the practical differences between them come down more to governance and release cadence than to day-to-day compatibility for most workloads that ran on CentOS.
What Migration Actually Involves
CentOS 7 does not support a direct in-place upgrade to AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux 9 — the version jump is too large. In practice, migration usually means provisioning a new server on the target distribution and moving the application and data across, rather than converting an existing installation.
AlmaLinux VPS → · Rocky Linux VPS →
Published by VPS For Life News Desk
