Preparing for CentOS End-of-Life? The Complete Guide to Solidifying a CentOS Migration

The Complete Guide to Solidifying a CentOS Migration

When the platform you’ve trusted for your Linux distribution is headed toward the end of its life, you’ve got to make plans to migrate your system to another operating system. Deciding on your new operating system affects how you prepare for the CentOS 8 end-of-life.

Understand that if your organization is not ready to migrate in response to the end-of-life announcement, there are options to help you postpone the process and complete your migration strategy on your own timeline.

Evaluate the benefits of a timely migration

Before moving your business to a new platform, evaluating how the migration will benefit your operation is worthwhile. Making a significant change like this can affect your business’s security, but it could also improve your company’s tech performance.

Determine how much time your in-house developers will need

Moving away from CentOS 8 could be a costly undertaking, especially for your in-house development team’s person-hours. Migrations can be complicated procedures that often involve unexpected problems. You’ll need to determine how many person-hours your developers will need to ensure that your new system runs safely and smoothly.

Remember that you’re still paying your developers for their time, but that time is not being spent making new things. When developers work through migration issues, they aren’t working with customers and optimizing pre-existing tools. You may want to consider bringing in outside help if the human downtime isn’t in the cards for your business development.

Ensure you have a team that can work through migration issues

Your in-house developers might be knowledgeable about software development, but IT migration issues might not be their forte. Ask your team about their comfort level with the end-of-life migration. If your developers aren’t, you might have to find a team to help with the migration process. You might have to hire through a freelance website or find local temporary workers.

Consider planning and logistics

When your company is migrating, the process can take away precious time from other focus areas. You will have to plan for outage time, and if you get too close to the end-of-life moment, you could have problems with your entire platform and operating system.

What will your team do when the system is down? How will you accommodate your customers and vendors? How long do you anticipate the migration to shut down your operations?

Figure out what migration options you have

Before you decide how to handle the CentOS 8 end-of-life problems, you’ve got to determine what operating system will meet your needs. You can choose from open-source options or commercial options.

Open-source options include Linux solutions like Rocky Linux and Navy Linux. Even though CentOS 8 is ending, CentOS 7 will still be available through June 2024. Going backward to CentOS 7 only postpones the inevitable.

Other open-source options include Upstream RHEL for rolling releases through a Red Hat distributor. Your company could also investigate the possibilities of OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and different ecosystems. These could be challenging, primarily if you’ve relied on Linux for years.

Commercial options include RHEL, which will keep your operating system in the same ecosystem. Unfortunately, the price tag might be cost-prohibitive for companies that want to minimize operating-system expenditures. Other commercial options include Ubuntu Enterprise and Amazon Linux.

The safest choice for migrating from an open-source Linux system is to another Linux system. However, any migration could be fraught with challenges.

Final word

Before undertaking an end-of-life plan to recover from the impending doom of CentOS 8, businesses need to make several decisions. These decisions can help prevent catastrophes related to data security, person-hours, and losing valuable time. Thoughtful planning can prevent unexpected problems from shutting down your business.