Red Hat has called time on CoreOS Container Linux and urged users to begin moving to another operating system “as soon as possible” before the lights go out completely in September.

Presumably Red Hat would prefer that migration to be to Fedora CoreOS, which it has designated as the “official successor” to the lightweight operating system and which officially came out of preview last month.

According to Red Hat, it is “built specifically for running containerized workloads securely and at scale” and “combines the provisioning tools and automatic update model of Container Linux with the packaging technology, OCI support, and SELinux security of Atomic Host.”

The end of life announcement says that “effective immediately, the CoreOS Container Linux listing on AWS Marketplace will no longer be available to new subscribers.” Existing subscribers will be unaffected – for now.

Final updates will roll out on May 26, and bugs or vulnerabilities discovered after that date will not be fixed. 

Then, as of 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.”

Existing Container Linux machines will continue running, it said, but will not be able to download updates, while “new CoreOS Container Linux machines will not be launchable in public clouds without prior preparation.”

Red Hat hoovered up CoreOS back in 2018, paying $250m for the five year old company and gaining Kubernetes platform Tectonic, container registry Quay, and etcd, as well as Container Linux.

Sine then, Tectonic has been merged into Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform, Quay lives on within – and without – OpenShift, while etcd was donated to the CNCF.