CentOS Hyperscale is CentOS targetted towards enabling CentOS Stream deployment on large-scale infrastructures and facilitating collaboration on packages and tooling. It is being built by a group of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and other hyperscalers, by making optional changes to CentOS Stream to better suit the Linux distribution to their internal needs.

CentOS Hyperscale packages can be accessed by installing the package centos-release-hyperscale through the usual dnf command.

sudo dnf install centos-release-hyperscale

This release package will pull in epel-release, as EPEL is a prerequisite for Hyperscale. It is also recommended to enable PowerTools (which is itself a prerequisite for EPEL).

sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools

A minimal container image based on the Hyperscale SIG repos and packages is available on Quay.io and can be used via Docker or Podman.

CentOS Stream 8

podman run -a stdin,stdout,stderr -t quay.io/centoshyperscale/centos:stream8

CentOS Stream 9

podman run -a stdin,stdout,stderr -t quay.io/centoshyperscale/centos:stream9

CentOS Hyperscale Kernel

The CentOS Hyperscale Kernel is currently maintained in the CentOS experimental repository. This kernel is based on the CentOS Stream 9 kernel and tries to follow it as closely as possible, while enabling additional features such as btrfs and Kernel Live Patching. In turn, the CentOS Stream 9 kernel is based on the upstream RHEL 9 kernel sources, which is where the RHEL 9 kernel is developed and maintained. The Hyperscale kernel is built for both CentOS Stream 8 and CentOS Stream 9 from the same sources

CentOS Hyperscale Container Images

The Hyperscale containers for both CentOS Stream 8 and CentOS Stream 9 are publicly hosted at Quay.

CentOS has announced that CentOS 9 Stream Appliances will soon be available via KIWI on the CentOS-Infra repository.

What is KIWI?

KIWI is one of the most popular command line utility to build Linux system appliances. KIWI had recently phased out its legacy code and has now come up with KIWI NG (Next Generation) with the release of v9.x, which is now stable and ready to be used for live projects.

KIWI NG can create images in ISO, PXE as well as Vagrant formats.

What is a CentOS 9 Stream Appliance?

An Appliance is a ready to use image of any Operating System (CentOS 9 Stream in this case) which can be used in any Workstation environment, Cloud, Vagrant or any other type of containers.

The need for Appliances of any Operating System arises due to the additional needs of Cloud or Containerised environments, where one would need API access between the Cloud or Container managers, including RedHat’s own OpenShift Container Orchestrator and the OS for being able to manage the workflow of the Operating System right from the management consoles.

The work for the first stable release of the CentOS 9 Stream Appliance is in progress and one can checkout the same on the CentOS Community Build Service Staging Repository.

Where are the legacy CentOS Appliances?

The legacy CentOS Appliances can still be accessed at the CentOS Virtualization Appliances repository.

AWS has recently announced the public preview of its next version of Amazon Linux. Amazon linux 3, codenamed AL2022, brings in improvements in design, security, stability and performance over its predecessor Amazon Linux 2.

Starting with AL2022, Amazon will launch a major version of its Amazon Linux every two years and each version will be supported for five years, with quarterly updates via minor releases and use the latest software for their applications. Starting, Amazon Linux 3, they have finally introduced the ability to lock to a specific version of the Amazon Linux package repository giving customers control over how and when they absorb updates.

Amazon Linux is a Linux distribution targetted and optimized for use in the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment of Amazon Web Services. It uses the same Yum repository for updates using the RPM files like the Fedora, CentOS and Redhat family of Linux.

While earlier versions of Amazon Linux, 1 and 2 were built upon CentOS, since the movement of CentOS also to the upstream of Redhat development with CentOS Stream, now, both CentOS Stream 9 and Amazon Linux use Fedora Project as their upstream, with CentOS stream also becoming the upstream for the eventual major build of Redhat.

While Amazon Linux 3 is still to offer support for ARM processors, CentOS 9 Stream has support across the processor variates including x86_64, aarch64 and ppc64le.

As a final note, we can just add that both, Amazon Linux 3 as well as CentOS 9 Stream have the stable and well tested Linux Enterprise Kernel, are both free and targetted towards Enterprises and Server side installs. While Amazon Linux 3 is well suited for EC2 instances, similar to CentOS 9 Stream, you can download Amazon Linux 3 on your local machines using VirtualBox or VMWare.

Download Amazon Linux 3 for VMWare

Download Amazon Linux 3 for VirtualBox

Download CentOS 9 Stream for VMWare

Download CentOS 9 Stream for VirtualBox