Enterprise-grade AlmaLinux 8.5 has full feature parity with newest Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, serving as a drop-in replacement for former CentOS users
PALO ALTO, Calif., November 12, 2021–(BUSINESS WIRE)–AlmaLinux OS Foundation, the nonprofit that stewards the community owned and governed open source CentOS alternative, today announced delivery of its third stable release within 48 hours of general availability of the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) 8.5 release. AlmaLinux 8.5 has full feature parity with RHEL’s newest release including improvements that make it easier for DevOps teams to manage containerized workloads, as well as updated programming languages and security and compliance tools.
“The AlmaLinux community is highly motivated to deliver stable releases in sync with the RHEL release timeline to promote stability and continuity for those managing production workloads on AlmaLinux,” said Jack Aboutboul, community manager for AlmaLinux. “As CentOS Linux comes to end of life this year, we aim to deliver the same high degree of quality, robustness, and timeliness end users would expect from a CentOS successor to provide a free and reliable, enterprise-grade Linux alternative.”
AlmaLinux is a production-ready drop-in replacement for the CentOS Linux distribution that will cease to be supported at the end of this year. The 8.5 release includes improvements to container management tools, several new module streams, enhancements and additions to System Roles, an enhanced Cockpit web console, support for OpenJDK 17, additional security features for personal access tokens, and network time security (NTS) for Network Time Protocol (NTP). This release supports the x86_64 and aarch64 architectures, including Raspberry Pi.
Since its first stable release in March 2021, the AlmaLinux community has also added a number of new offerings and improvements in direct response to end user requests. This includes cloud images for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and others; a full Red Hat UBI-equivalent set of containers; Live Images for GNOME, KDE and XFCE desktop environments; and a Raspberry Pi Image. A Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark is also available for AlmaLinux to assist administrators in hardening their installations.
AlmaLinux 8.5 is available immediately to download for use in on-premises data centers and edge locations, and updated images will soon be available on AWS, Azure, Google, and Docker Hub. The foundation’s ELevate project simplifies migration between major versions of RHEL-based distributions from 7.x to the 8.x EL family distribution of your choice.
Resources
- AlmaLinux 8.5 Release Notes
- AlmaLinux 8.5 installation and upgrade
- ELevate – Migrate from RHEL-based 7.x distributions to 8.x
- AlmaLinux CIS Benchmark
- AlmaLinux Wiki
- AlmaLinux Chat
About AlmaLinux
AlmaLinux OS is an open source, community-governed and forever-free enterprise Linux distribution. It is focused on long-term stability and delivering a robust production-grade platform. It is 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL(r) and pre-Steam CentOS. The AlmaLinux OS falls under the purview of The AlmaLinux OS Foundation, which is a 501(c)(6) non-profit created for the benefit of the AlmaLinux OS community. https://almalinux.org/
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