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On May 26th, 2020, the Container Linux distribution by CoreOS has officially reached end of life, which means that it will no longer be supported or maintained.
Today, we’re saying goodbye to another great GNU/Linux distribution, CoreOS Linux. The well-known container-focused distro is no more and will no longer receive updates or security patches.
May 26th was the last day the distribution was supported by CoreOS. It’s been pulled for new subscribers on the AWS Marketplace and all published resources will be deleted after September 1st, 2020.
As announced earlier this year, the CoreOS team has joined the Red Hat family to focus on other projects, including two forks called Fedora CoreOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS), the latter being available only as part of a Red Hat OpenShift subscription (thanks Andrew Randall).
All CoreOS Linux users are now urged to migrate to a similar operating system as soon as possible since any bugs or security vulnerabilities discovered after May 26th will not be fixed.
“Documentation will continue to exist for as long as is practical, to aid migration to other operating systems. Existing Container Linux machines will continue running, but will no longer be able to download updates,” said CoreOS.
Container Linux alternatives
Probably the smart choice for an alternative would be the community-supported Fedora CoreOS, but the distribution doesn’t currently offer native support for Azure, DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Vagrant, or any of the CoreOS Linux community-supported platforms, nor does it include the rkt container runtime.
Therefore, existing CoreOS Linux users might want to take a look at Flatcar Container Linux, which promises to be a safe bet for those who want to migrate. It’s a drop-in replacement and a friendly fork of Container Linux offering commercial support and custom engineering services.
Other CoreOS alternatives you might want to check out are RancherOS, a lightweight and secure GNU/Linux distribution built for containers, and Ubuntu Core from Canonical, which isn’t a pure container operating system but will let you run apps and containers side by side and offers transactional updates.
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