Community ENTerprise Linux Operating System (CentOS) is a community-driven free software effort focused on delivering a robust open source ecosystem around a Linux platform. It is an enterprise class operating system supported by the community and released back in 2004. It is also referred to as the replica of Red Hat Enterprise Linux which is considered as the most widely used in the corporate Information Technology world.
Why should we use CentOS?
- CentOS is a very stable, predictable, secure and free Linux operating system. It’s one of the most deployed OS on the server and most stable operating systems out there.
- CentOS comes with 10 years support. That’s huge, especially for enterprise software. They also come with stable ABIs meaning that packages built today with will still run 10 years from now.
- CentOS is updated no more than twice a month. That means stable and more up to date software than Debian Stable for example.
- CentOS is always released with a LTS Linux kernel.
- Upgrades are pretty stable so you most likely won’t need to reinstall or perform major upgrade from scratch in existing instances.
- You can run CentOS in a multitude of architectures including x86-64, POWER 8 and 64-bit ARM.