CentOS Stream 8 END OF LIFE : 2024-05-31

CentOS Stream 8 EOL

CentOS Stream 8 will reach its end of life on May 31st, 2024. When that happens, the CentOS Infrastructure will follow the standard practice it has been doing since the early days of CentOS Linux:

1. Move all content to https://vault.centos.org/
2. Stop the mirroring software from responding to EL-8 queries. 

The first change usually causes any mirror doing an rsync with delete options to remove the contents from their mirror. The second change will cause the dnf or yum commands to break with errors. The vault system is also a single server with few active mirrors of its contents. As such, it is likely to be overloaded and very slow to respond as additional requests are made of it.

In total, if you are using CentOS Stream 8 in either production or a CI/CD system, you can expect a lot of errors on June 1st or shortly afterwords. 

What you can do!

There are several steps you can do to get ahead of a possible tsunami of problems:

1. You can look to moving to a newer release of CentOS Stream before the end of the month. This usually will require deployment of new images or installs versus straight updates. 
2. You can see if any of the 'move my Enterprise Linux' tools have added support for moving from CentOS Stream 8 to their EL8.10. For releases before 8.10, this was very hard because CentOS Stream 8 was usually the next release, but 8.10 is at a point where Alma, Oracle, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or Rocky are at the same revisions or newer.
3. You can start mirroring the CentOS Stream 8 content into your infrastructure and point any CI/CD or other systems to that mirror which will allow you to continue to function.

Mirroring CentOS Stream

Of the three options, I recommend the third. However in working out what is needed to mirror CentOS Stream, I realized I needed newer documentation and it would probably be a long post in itself. For a shorter version for self-starters, I recommend the documentation on the CentOS wiki,  https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos(2f)CreateLocalMirror.html  While the information was written for CentOS Linux 6 which was end-of-lifed in 2020, it covers most of the instructions needed. The parts which may need updating is the amount of disk space required for CentOS Stream which seems to be about 280 GB for everything and maybe around 120GB for any one architecture. 

 References:

• https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos(2f)CreateLocalMirror.html
• https://lists.centos.org/hyperkitty/list/devel@lists.centos.org/thread/DS7Q6NQWYD3YXCECJPSAXFFSRSDIJG2Q/
• https://lists.centos.org/hyperkitty/list/devel@lists.centos.org/thread/BIWCCSDWOPCX5DMDEYJVTTEXHNYHSJZ3/