Extended Lifecycle Support
for CentOS 8

The official vendor support for CentOS 8 has now been discontinued. If you have any workloads still relying on CentOS 8 you won’t receive ongoing vendor updates. When a new vulnerability for CentOS 8 surfaces – and it will – you won’t get a fix, and your systems will be vulnerable to the resulting exploit.

However, you can sign up for TuxCare Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) to cover you for security fixes for CentOS 8 right through to January 2026, just the same way Red Hat support would cover you, if it was still available.

Yes, but you need to find a way to ensure that you apply critical security patches. You can develop these patches in-house if your organization has the required Linux server kernel development expertise.

Your alternative is to partner with a vendor that can provide these patches for you. With TuxCare ELS you can continue to use CentOS 8 right through to January 2026. However, you cannot continue using CentOS 8 on production systems without third-party support.

There are two parts to this answer. The CentOS project is continuing in the shape of CentOS Stream, a CentOS version that is a rolling release, continuous delivery Linux distribution that is essentially a preview of the regular RHEL stable releases issued by Red Hat.

The change lies in that there will no longer be new releases of a fixed, stable version of CentOS. With respect to workloads that relied on binary compatibility with RHEL, CentOS 8 is now discontinued as the rolling release CentOS Stream will not be binary compatible with the latest RHEL release.

Moreover, CentOS stream is only suitable if you build your own OS, if you’re running it in a single desktop environment, or if you can handle downtime. Users who run RHEL-certified applications on CentOS Stream risk losing support and breaking compliance.

CentOS Stream is the replacement for CentOS 8. For some members of the CentOS community, CentOS Stream would be a suitable replacement for their workload, for example in some scientific or development environments or where just one or two machines are involved.

However, CentOS Stream’s rolling release nature means it’s not a replacement for many enterprise production workloads; or for web hosts who are CentOS users. And, in that sense, there is no direct replacement for CentOS 8, though alternative Linux distros include AlmaLinux, Amazon Linux, Oracle Linux, Rocky Linux, or even Ubuntu.

AlmaLinux is a RHEL derivative, like CentOS, that many organizations are choosing to replace CentOS with. As a forever-free, community-driven distribution, AlmaLinux comes with a number of advantages, including the possibility to extend its support lifecycle to 16 years with the addition of AlmaCare from TuxCare – an enterprise-grade support solution that offers live patching, painless compliance, and pay-as-you-go hourly support options.

We support CentOS 8.4 and 8.5 Stable. For this and other distro support, please see: https://docs.tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/