The OpenDev team has been cleaning up old distro releases from Zuul and Nodepool. Recently, OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 and Debian Buster were removed. Next up on the list is CentOS 7. Unlike Leap and Buster, CentOS 7 is/was used quite a bit more in Zuul configs. According to codesearch [0] these projects are still using CentOS 7 in their master branches:

* Swift * OpenStack Ansible * Devstack * Freezer * Solum * Octavia

This is likely an incomplete list of OpenStack projects that need cleanup, and I know there are other projects to clean up outside of OpenStack. It would be great if we can clean this up in the near future (and thank you to those of you who have already started). This ensures we don't have another stable branch perpetuating old configs that need cleanup. I have also asked the release team to start communicating cleanups happen early around release time rather than waiting for branch EOL to prevent these configs moving through our releases unnecessarily. Cleanup will also minimize impact when we remove the node type from our CI system on March 15, 2024.

The motivation for this cleanup effort is that we've got a number of old distro releases in the CI system that need care and feeding which are either EOL, soon to be EOL, or otherwise unused. Removing these test node types gives us room to add new test node types like the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 release. We plan to remove Ubuntu Xenial test nodes after CentOS 7 is removed if you want to get a head start on that cleanup too.

We understand that this may impact the OpenStack release which is why I'm sending this email. At the same time we want to be in a position where we can have new distro releases ready in a reasonable time frame which necessitates cleanup like this. Please feel free to respond to this thread with any questions or concerns.

[0] https://codesearch.opendev.org/?q=centos-7

Clark