You may have seen our post from a few months ago about the inevitable (and surprising!) demise of CentOS, one of the most popular server operating systems. This has naturally led to much conversation about a suitable replacement, some of which we touched upon in our post.
AlmaLinux is one new contender worth knowing about. Created by commercial CentOS distributor CloudLinux, which has been customizing RHEL/CentOS servers for the past decade.
In the official announcement, the team said:
“So, after about 4 months since the decision to steer CentOS in a different path, you now have a 1:1 binary compatible drop-in replacement, with a very long support timeframe. You can use it for any general purpose computing need, in bare-metal installations, in virtual machines, in containers, on cloud providers – we got you covered with official images for all those cases. And have we mentioned ARM support is coming soon too?”
Like CentOS, AlmaLinux will be free. Alongside the launch, CloudLinux also created the AlmaLinux Open Source Foundation, which will manage AlmaLinux going forward, partially with help of a $1 million per year commitment by CloudLinux.
AlmaLinux’s first community manager will be Jack Aboutboul, a former Red Hat and Fedora engineer and architect, with 20 years of experience in various roles.
As of right now, AlmaLinux is a one-to-one binary compatible fork of RHEL 8. As stated by its documentation, it will attempt to keep step-in-step with future RHEL releases.
For those looking to migrate to AlmaLinux, from RHEL CentOS, or Oracle Linux, migration instructions are now available.
cPanel now officially supports AlmaLinux and AlmaLinux is available on all CanSpace VPS and Dedicated Servers. If you have questions about what you need to do if you currently use CentOS, want to migrate to AlmaLinux, or generally about which OS would be best for your server, reach out to us!
