We’ve been providing CentOS images for cloud servers for many years now. In December 2020, RedHat announced that CentOS 8 would be the last version to be a 100% binary compatible rebuild of RedHat Enterprise and instead that it would be introducing CentOS Stream as an upstream development release for RedHat Enterprise.
A number of alternatives surfaced but the most promising were Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, both aimed to be 1:1 binary compatible forks of RHEL with slightly different governance models.
We’ve decided to make AlmaLinux our official RHEL-compatible image rather than Rocky because Alma made providing cloud images a priority early-on and have mostly got new releases out in good time. Rocky has recently improved in this regard and do now have cloud images available but going on previous track record, AlmaLinux is our pick.
So, like all of our other official linux distro images, AlmaLinux images are now automatically imported and verified before being made available for cloud server builds. And our official images are, wherever possible, provided completely unmodified from the upstream source, so you can be sure there are no hidden surprises. If your systems work on the upstream images, they’ll work on ours.
I will point out that had the choice been based on logo design alone – which as a poncy designer, is how I choose all software – Rocky would have won hands-down. Apparently, the Alma name is based on the Latin word “almus”, which means “kind” – but this logo is anything but kind to anyone who has to scale it down for use in a web-based card selector UI, as a completely random example.
Anyway, rant over, there we have it – new 100% RHEL compatible images ready to use now!
If there are other well-maintained linux distros that you’d like to see us offer in the cloud server image library, do let us know.
Of course, if you’re not yet a Brightbox customer, you can create an account in just 2 minutes and get £50 free trial credit to try the new images out.
