CentOS 8 is dead: choosing a replacement Docker image
For many years, CentOS provided a free, binary-compatible version of RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
But as of January 2022, CentOS 8 has reached its end-of-life, even as RHEL 8 will still be supported for many years.
So if you’ve been using centos:8 as your base Docker image, what should you use now?
Motivation: a stable, long-term-support base image
RHEL 8 was released in May 2019, will continue to get full support until May 2024, and security updates until May 2029.
RedHat has also added support for software that has been released since 2019, so you can for example install Python 3.9.
A Linux distribution that guarantees backwards compatibility, has good long-term availability of security updates, and also adds new packages over time makes a