Not too long ago, Red Hat, CentOS’s Linux parent company, said it was refocusing from CentOS Linux (the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linus (RHEL)) to CentOS Stream, which is just ahead of a current RHEL release, many CentOS users were justifiably annoyed.
Because of that, commercial CentOS distributor CloudLinux announced that it would make a new CentOS clone named Lenix.
The clone was renamed to AlmaLinux OS and is now available in more markets than before. AlmaLinux lends itself to commercial adoption since it is ready to run on the Azure marketplace.
Where is it?
Users can find images for both Gen 1 and Gen 2, deployable from the Azure portal. You can also deploy it using the Azure shell utility, also available from the marketplace.
So, what does it cost to get AlmaLinux going? Well, try zero dollars.
Then again, many Linux distros are available for free on the clouds. However, AlmaLinux has more to offer enterprise users than many of the others. The reason for that is because the parent company, CloudLinux, has been giving users a customized, performance-optimized, lightweight RHEL/CentOS server clone for multitenancy web and server hosting companies for about 11 years now.
AlmaLinux is the consolation abandoned CentOS users needed
CentOS is still available but is not an entirely different approach to RHEL. Instead of being a RHEL clone, the new CentOS Stream is a developer-oriented release that releases just ahead of a current RHEL version.
AlmaLinux is not just new but also a one-to-one binary compatible fork of RHEL 8.3
If you are looking to get a stable and ready for production workload replacement for the abandoned CentOS, AlmaLinux is the distro to beat.