We are currently having discussions with a 3rd party vendor to provide Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) for all our Azure Marketplace listed CentOS 8 images. This will most probably come with an additional monthly subscription and will be available till the end of 2025.

This is a minimal CentOS 8.2 image, mainly used as a common base system on top of which other appliances could be built and tested. It contains just enough packages to run within Azure, bring up a SSH Server and allow users to login.

Azure Linux Agent, cloud-init, as well as the CentOS 8 security updates available at the release date are included.

Root login is disabled and only the user account specified at launch time (or the default cloud-user) is allowed to connect, preferably using ssh public key authentication.

Built using CentOS 8 'Minimal Install' group of packages and a single 30 GiB OS disk. Both root partition and the corresponding filesystem are automatically extended if the selected disk size is bigger than the default one. OS disk is partitoned using GPT (GUID Partition Table) instead of MBR (Master Boot Record). This allows usage of OS disks bigger than 2 TiB in size.

This image comes with SELinux enabled.

Accelerated Networking is supported as well.

On December 8th 2020, Red Hat and CentOS announced that CentOS 8 will reach end of life at the end of 2021, 8 years ahead of schedule. Since then, many CentOS users, including engineers at ProComputers, have been looking for alternatives. Below is a list with a few RHEL based Linux distributions that we think are the best to function as CentOS 8 replacements:

• AlmaLinux 8
• Rocky Linux 8
• CentOS Stream