End-of-life announcement for CoreOS Container Linux

On May 26, 2020, CoreOS Container Linux will reach its end of life and will no longer receive updates. We strongly recommend that users begin migrating their workloads to another operating system as soon as possible.

Introducing Fedora CoreOS

As we've previously announced, Fedora CoreOS is the official successor to CoreOS Container Linux. Fedora CoreOS is a new Fedora Edition built specifically for running containerized workloads securely and at scale. It combines the provisioning tools and automatic update model of Container Linux with the packaging technology, OCI support, and SELinux security of Atomic Host. For more on the Fedora CoreOS philosophy, goals, and design, see the announcement of the preview release and the Fedora CoreOS documentation.

We'd love for you to try Fedora CoreOS and get involved! You can report bugs and missing features to the issue tracker and discuss Fedora CoreOS in Fedora Discourse, the development mailing list, in #fedora-coreos on Freenode, or at our weekly IRC meetings.

Migrating from CoreOS Container Linux

For more information about migrating to Fedora CoreOS, see the migration notes. Be aware that Fedora CoreOS cannot currently replace Container Linux for all use cases:

It does not yet include native support for Azure, DigitalOcean, GCE, Vagrant, or the Container Linux community-supported platforms.

The rkt container runtime is not included.

Fedora CoreOS provides best-effort stability, and may occasionally include regressions or breaking changes for some use cases or workloads.

We recommend making your own decisions about where and how to run Fedora CoreOS based on your use case, operational needs, and experience.

If Fedora CoreOS doesn't meet your needs, you may want to consider Flatcar Container Linux, which is a fork of CoreOS Container Linux. In addition, Red Hat OpenShift includes RHEL CoreOS as an integral component.

End-of-life timeline

Effective immediately, the CoreOS Container Linux listing on AWS Marketplace will no longer be available to new subscribers. Note that this does not affect existing subscribers to Container Linux on AWS Marketplace, nor does it affect users launching Container Linux via the AMI IDs listed on the CoreOS download page.

On May 26, the final updates to CoreOS Container Linux will begin rolling out. Any bugs or security vulnerabilities discovered after that date will not be fixed.

On or after September 1, published resources related to CoreOS Container Linux will be deleted or made read-only. OS downloads will be removed, CoreUpdate servers will be shut down, and OS images will be removed from AWS, Azure, and Google Compute Engine. GitHub repositories, including the issue tracker, will become read-only. 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. New CoreOS Container Linux machines will not be launchable in public clouds without prior preparation.

We know this timeline is aggressive. We've tried to provide the longest possible migration period consistent with our ability to maintain the OS. We will be taking the unusual step of deleting CoreOS Container Linux artifacts and images after September 1 to discourage continued use after the OS is no longer receiving security updates.

Boldly go

We'd like to extend our gratitude to our users, contributors, partners, and advocates who contributed to the success of CoreOS and Container Linux over the years. We'd especially like to thank Rackspace, DigitalOcean, and Azure for their early support and Geoff Levand for his contributions to the ARM64 port. It's been a pleasure collaborating with all of you and we hope we've provided a useful service.

As always, if you have any questions, please get in touch via the coreos-user mailing list or in #coreos on Freenode.