Upcoming Kibana releases to run Node.js 18

We quickly discovered that Node.js 18 dropped support for certain older Linux distributions that are still part of the Kibana support matrix — most 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The technical reason is that Node.js 18 is now compiled against a newer version of the GNU C Library (glibc) — specifically, version 2.28 — which these older distributions do not support.

To ensure continued support of those Linux distributions, we needed to build a custom version of Node.js for Linux against the older 2.17 version of glibc. This has unfortunately delayed Kibana’s upgrade to Node.js 18. In addition, the Node.js project announced that it would bring forward the End-of-Life (EoL) date for Node.js 16 — the LTS version of Node.js on which Kibana currently runs — to September 11, 2023. The EoL date comes 7 months earlier than the original date, after which it will no longer receive any bug fixes or security patches.