CentOS 7 | Support by cloudimg

End-of-life notice — read first. CentOS Linux 7 reached end-of-life on 30 June 2024. The upstream CentOS Project no longer produces any updates for it, including security updates. This image is patched only to its capture date, from the frozen CentOS 7.9.2009 vault, and is provided for legacy-migration use. Over time it will carry unpatched vulnerabilities that cannot be remediated by updating CentOS 7, because upstream ships nothing further. Plan a migration to a supported distribution (AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, CentOS Stream, or a current RHEL) for any workload that must remain secure.

CentOS 7 is a production CentOS Linux 7.9.2009 image (the final CentOS 7 release), a free community rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and binary compatible with RHEL 7. Because the original mirrors were retired at end-of-life, every repository has been repointed to the CentOS 7.9.2009 vault (vault.centos.org), so yum keeps working against the frozen final package set out of the box. The image is brought fully up to date with the last available vault packages at build time and an automated gate blocks capture if any update remains outstanding.

It ships with no known credential: the root password is locked, password authentication is disabled, root SSH login is prohibited (set in the main sshd_config — CentOS 7 has no sshd_config.d include), and no authorized_keys are baked in, so access is only ever by the SSH key you supply when you create the VM. The machine identity and SSH host keys are regenerated per instance. SELinux is left in enforcing mode; the unused rpcbind listener on port 111 is disabled; no swap is baked into the image, so Azure manages swap on the ephemeral resource disk. Azure provisioning is handled by an injected WALinuxAgent plus cloud-init. Gen1 (BIOS) Hyper-V.

Licensing — a collection of independently licensed open source packages (GPL, LGPL, MIT, BSD, Apache-2.0, MPL and more), FREE. CentOS Linux requires no subscription, no licence key and no Red Hat entitlement; the end-of-life status is a support-lifecycle disclosure, not a licensing restriction. The cloudimg charge ($0.04 per vCPU/hour) covers packaging, image maintenance and 24/7 expert support.

Recommended: Standard_B2s or larger. Target: running or testing software certified only on the CentOS 7 / RHEL 7 platform while you re-platform, lift-and-shift of an existing CentOS 7 estate into Azure as a migration step, and RHEL 7 ABI compatibility work. Prerequisites: Azure subscription, VNet, SSH key; the NSG should permit port 22 from your management network.