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Red Hat released RHEL version 8.0 on May 7, 2019 so lots of folks are looking where is the equivalent build of CentOS. Well long story short, looking at the history it takes about a month to spin out a production release of CentOS after RHEL is released. Red Hat released RHEL7 on June 10 (2014) and CENTOS7 was released officially on July 7 (2014) almost a month later. So you should expect, rough and tough to see CetnOS8 released in the month June of 2019.
Once CentOS8 is released you can download it from the official project download site.
If you are clamoring to track the blow by blow status of the release progress, keep an eye on the project status page for the creation of CentOS 8.
Now the question, you have waited your time, what will you get? Well first of all you get a supported version longer than CentOS7. The fact of technology, is you have to always upgrade from time to time to stay with a working and supported version. So at some point regardless of the features provided in CentOS8 you will want to upgrade in order to be on the latest version if you like your CentOS systems.
Some interesting highlights from the new release that caught my eye:
- Java 8 and Java 11 are both supported and native to the platform
- Python 3 is the default but you have to install it yourself with yum
- New Composer Tool for creating system images
- New Stratis storage management tool
- Session Recording which can be used for recording all activity of users who connect to a system via ssh. This could be interesting from a security point of view. This uses SSSD, system security services daemon
- XFS Copy on Write Data Extents which can help with performance and disk usage by not copying large files until data is changed in the copy
- System Wide Cryptographic Policies, which make it easier to create and manage configurations of all the necessary security protocols that are available such as network, disk, dns encryption, and kerberos etc.
- The Virtual Data Optimizer which provides native storage de-duplication by the linux kernel, awesome!
- Encrypted Root FileSystem for enhanced security
In summary it looks like RHEL8, and CENTOS 8, to follow is a feature packed release especially for Security, Performance, and Containerization and Virtualization. So its not just to stay up to date but their is real value here in this release and it should be well received by the user community. Keep your eyes and ears open in the month of June for the drop of CentOS 8.
