As announced by IBM on December 6 2023, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 will reach its End of Support (EOS) on June 30 2024. No further maintenance support releases of RHEL 7.9 will be published, which means that Red Hat will stop issuing bug fixes and patches for security vulnerabilities. Consequently, Aerospike will no longer produce el7 RPMs for Aerospike Database versions 6.1, 6.3 and 6.4 after the RHEL 7 EOS, in order to adhere to our security compliance standards.
The performance of Aerospike Database depends in part on the Linux kernel, and older versions of RHEL, such as RHEL 7 and RHEL 8, are packaged with old, lower performance, and out of support versions of the Linux kernel, which no longer get bug fixes. For example, we have encountered support cases where a serious bug in Linux kernel 3.10 (bundled with RHEL 7) affected customer deployments. Therefore, we always recommend pairing Aerospike Database with a modern Linux kernel. It is worth mentioning that Linux kernel 4.19, which is bundled with RHEL 8, reaches the end of its long-term support (LTS) on December 31 2024, coinciding with the end of RHEL 8 full support.
Customers who are currently deployed on a RHEL 7 variant (CentOS 7, Oracle Linux 7, Amazon Linux 2, etc) should plan to upgrade their operating system before this EOS date. The platform support and compatibility page describes our OS support for different versions - Aerospike Database versions 6.3 and 6.4 have RPMs for RHEL 7, 8 and 9. If you need assistance, please contact the Aerospike support team.