Highlights

  • Currently, CentOS 7 will be supported until June 30, 2024, unlike CentOS 8, which suddenly ended support in December 2021.
  • Rocky Linux that has been optimized for Google Cloud may include GPUs and day one support.

Rocky Linux is on track. Days after the release of Rocky Linux 9, Google Cloud suggested Rocky Linux as an alternative for CentOS 7. Much unlike CentOS 8, which ended abruptly in December 2021, CentOS 7 will continue to receive support till June 30, 2024. But it’s soon enough for major corporations like Facebook, Disney, GoDaddy, RackSpace, Toyota, and Verizon to consider alternatives after relying on CentOS, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone. Additionally, RHEL and Rocky Linux are completely compatible.

This information comes close on the heels of Google’s revelation of Rocky Linux customer support with CIQ. Rocky’s authorized support and service provider is CIQ. Google has now declared that Rocky Linux, optimized for Google Cloud, will be generally accessible.

This set of Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) images were produced jointly by Google and CIQ. They have been developed to give the best performance possible when running CentOS workloads on Rocky Linux on Compute Engine.

Rocky is specifically pre-configured to use the most recent Google virtual network interface (gVNIC). Virtually any job will benefit from the high bandwidth networking made possible by these adaptations; clustered workloads like High-Performance Computing (HPC) will benefit from them.

How fast are these high bandwidth virtual machines?

With 80 or more virtual CPUs (vCPU), one can acquire 32 Gigabits per second (Gbps) of egress bandwidth. The speed increases to 100 Gbps with Tier 1. For the majority of HPC uses, that is more than fast enough.

Rocky Linux that has been optimized for Google Cloud may include GPUs and day-one support. Google suggests the community Rocky images for users creating multi-cloud setups. All x86-based Compute Engine VM families can use Rocky Linux 8 Optimized for Google Cloud. It will soon be accessible for the brand-new Arm-based Tau T2A as well.

Future major releases of Rocky Linux will be released by Google in both the community and optimized for Google Cloud versions. The most recent kernel and security updates are given for both sets of images. Images for Rocky Linux 9 will soon be accessible.