We’re very happy to announce the availability of CentOS 7.0 on all our cloud computing services. This means that you can now select “CentOS 7.0″ as a base image for your cloud server on our OpenStack® cloud and your server will be provisioned within less than 30 seconds. Your server will be provisioned on our all SSD storage and you can manage it using our easy to use control panel.

We’re big users of the CentOS eco-system and having used it from as far back as CentOS 4, we’re happy to see the ecosystem continue to grow and we part of it. We wanted to be one of the first cloud providers to introduce CentOS 7 so we were heavily testing during the beta periods to make sure that we can have it since day one. We’re proud to be one of the first providers to offer CentOS 7.

CentOS 7 brings big changes such as an updated kernel, linux container support, in-place upgrades, systemd, firewalld, grub2 and much more. We’re going to dive into a few cool new features which we consider to be extremely useful and important for us and most likely for others.

3.10.0 Kernel

An updated kernel is going to introduce a lot of new features which were previously not available, as well as many new optimizations. For example, there were many optimization in the 3.5 kernel version which improve filesystem performance. These optimizations help make for faster disk resizes which means faster server boot and resize times for us.

The 3.8 kernel version introduced support to dynamically reload partition tables which means that partition tables can be updated without reboots, something which allows us to resize filesystems much faster and easier. There are far too many features to list since CentOS 6’s kernel (2.6.32) and CentOS 7 (3.10.0). However, you should see improvements all across the board.

In-place Upgrades

One of the issues of going from one release of CentOS to another was upgrading. There is no straight forward supported upgrade path from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6 and the documentation clearly states “Similar to the practice of the upstream vendor, there is no supported path to ‘upgrade’ an installation of a prior major CentOS release (presently CentOS 5 or CentOS 4) to a new major release.”.

With the introduction of in-place upgrades, CentOS becomes a much easier to use operating system and the adoption rate of CentOS 7 should be much faster because of the easy upgrades. From now on, you should be able to upgrade to the new release of CentOS easily.

Getting Started

If you are a public cloud customer, you can simply login to your CloudConsole and create a new server from there, you’ll see the “CentOS 7.0″ option available under server images. If you are a cloud server customer, you can simply order a new server from our website and your CentOS 7.0 server will be provisioned instantly and automatically after payment.