Author: Thomas Watson
Kibana is built on the Node.js framework. To ensure the stability and longevity of each Kibana release, we always keep the bundled Node.js binaries up to date with the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release.
When Node.js version 18 was upgraded to LTS, we started work on upgrading Kibana to this major version.
challenge
We quickly discovered that Node.js 18 dropped support for some older Linux distributions that were still part of the Kibana support matrix , notably Ubuntu 16, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, and CentOS 7.
The technical reason is that Node.js 18 is now compiled against a newer version of the GNU C Library (glibc), specifically version 2.28, which is not supported by these older distributions.
To ensure continued support for these Linux distributions, we need to build a custom version of Node.js for Linux against the old 2.17 version of glibc. Unfortunately, this delayed the Kibana upgrade to Node.js 18. In addition, the Node.js project announced that it will advance the end-of-life (EoL) date for Node.js 16, the LTS release of Node.js. Kibana is currently up and running until September 11, 2023. The EoL date is 7 months earlier than originally scheduled, after which it will no longer receive any bug fixes or security patches.
solution
The good news is: we're done working on a custom build of Node.js, and the upcoming Kibana 8.10.0 and 7.17.13 will both ship with Node.js 18. Similar to our previous Node.js upgrades, this will be completely transparent to users and those running and deploying Kibana in production.
Additionally, we are working on making custom builds of Node.js available to any project via the nodejs/unofficial-builds repository on GitHub. Stay tuned for details.
operating system support
If you have an extended support contract with the OS vendor, this does not apply to non-proprietary software required to run on the OS. We recommend that customers running on the following Linux distributions plan to migrate to newer versions that support glibc v2.28+, migrate to Elastic Cloud , or use Docker images to run Kibana :
- CentOS/RHEL 7
- Oracle Enterprise Linux 7
- Ubuntu 16.04
- SLES12
- Debian 8
- Debian 9
We recommend minor upgrades to glibc v2.28+ support for customers running on the following Linux distributions:
- Ubuntu 18.04 — upgrade to Ubuntu 18.10
- Ubuntu 20.04 — upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04.5
- OpenSUSE 15 — Upgrade to OpenSUSE 15.4
- Amazon Linux 2 — Upgrade to Amazon Linux 2022
Finally, remember to keep your Elastic cluster up to date with new releases to ensure you benefit from the latest bug fixes and security updates.
The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this article is at the sole discretion of Elastic. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.