AlmaLinux
AlmaLinux is a community-owned and governed, enterprise-grade operating system providing 1:1 compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Born from the CentOS transition, AlmaLinux offers a stable, production-ready RHEL alternative.
Overview
AlmaLinux emerged in 2021 as a response to Red Hat's discontinuation of CentOS as a downstream RHEL rebuild, providing the community with a stable, production-ready RHEL alternative. Governed by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation with backing from CloudLinux, AlmaLinux delivers enterprise-grade reliability without licensing costs. My experience migrating infrastructure to AlmaLinux at LionLink Networks demonstrates its production-readiness and RHEL compatibility.
My AlmaLinux Experience
When Red Hat announced the end of CentOS as we knew it, I led the evaluation and migration to AlmaLinux at LionLink Networks. The transition from CentOS to AlmaLinux proved seamless, maintaining production stability while eliminating concerns about future CentOS Stream compatibility.
LionLink Infrastructure Migration
Migrated LionLink's infrastructure from CentOS to AlmaLinux across web servers, database hosts, monitoring infrastructure, and network services. The automated migration tool provided by AlmaLinux simplified the process, completing most migrations in under 30 minutes with zero downtime. Binary compatibility with RHEL ensured all existing software, scripts, and configurations worked identically.
Production Stability
AlmaLinux has proven rock-solid in production at LionLink, handling web hosting workloads, database operations (MySQL, PostgreSQL), containerized applications, and network infrastructure services. The RHEL compatibility means enterprise software vendors provide support, ISV certifications apply, and troubleshooting resources are abundant. Security updates arrive promptly, often within hours of RHEL releases.
Deployment Scenarios
AlmaLinux excels for organizations migrating from CentOS seeking a free RHEL alternative, production environments requiring RHEL compatibility without subscription costs, cloud deployments on AWS/Azure/GCP, containerized applications needing stable base images, web hosting and infrastructure services, and small to medium businesses needing enterprise Linux without licensing.