CentOS 6 goes End Of Life on 30 Nov 2020

CentOS 6 goes End of Life (EOL) on the 30th November 2020.
We recommend you upgrade to CentOS 7 or 8 before this date.

Technology and security evolves. New bugs are fixed and new threats prevented, so in order to maintain a secure infrastructure it is important to keep all software and systems up to date.  Once an operating system reaches end of life, it no longer receives updates, so will end up left with known security holes. Old operating systems don’t support the latest technologies, which new releases of software depend on, this can lead to compatibility issues.

There are some big changes between versions 6, 7 & 8.
In particular:

• CentOS 7 & 8 require a lot more disk space than CentOS 6
• CentOS 8 ships with Python v3 by default meaning old Python scripts may need to be re-written
• Both CentOS 7 & 8 ship with old versions of PHP (v5.4 & v7.2 respectively)

CentOS has a slow rolling release (five years between versions 7 & 8) while PHP is currently releasing new versions quickly (yearly) and only supporting them for 3 years. This makes supporting PHP on CentOS tricky but also brings opportunities…

Old PHP sites that need to run code which requires a old version of PHP can do so by running CentOS as RedHat will actively backport important security updates into old versions of PHP.

Modern PHP sites/frameworks that are typically kept up to date (such as WordPress) can struggle as PHP 5.4 went EOL on 3 Sep 2015 and PHP 7.2 goes EOL in four months meaning your site is already running sub optimal before even going live.

Leaving old CentOS 6 systems past November 2020 leaves you at risk to:

• Security vulnerabilities of the out of date system.
• Making your entire network more vulnerable.
• Software incompatibility.
• Compliance issues (PCI).
• Poor performance and reliability.

CentOS End of life dates:

• CentOS 7: 30th June 2024
• Cent0S 8: 31st May 2029

Not sure where to start? Contact us to help with your migration.