As you know, CentOS itself reached End-of-Life (EOL) on December 31, 2021, due to which corporate users across many industries are looking for alternatives.
GitLab Inc. is the open-core company that offers GitLab – a comprehensive DevOps platform that provides a complete CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) toolchain delivered in a single application.
Ukrainian developers Dimitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov released GitLab as a free, open-source application in 2011 and later formed the GitLab, Inc. organization in 2014.
GitLab’s core user functionality is a visual Git repository management system that allows users to browse, audit, merge, and perform other common tasks that otherwise necessitate the command line interface.
According to Wikipedia, GitLab has an estimated 30 million registered users and is used by large, well-known organizations like IBM, Sony, and NASA.
GitLab has emerged as an effective alternative to GitHub following its acquisition by Microsoft, at least for many free software projects that see this software forge and DevOps platform as an alternative.
In addition, well-known open source projects like GNOME, KDE, freedesktop.org, and many others use GitLab services.
With CentOS going EOL, we needed to choose a build platform to replace our Centos8 build machines. Omnibus GitLab is a way to package different services and tools required to run GitLab, so that most users can install it without laborious configuration. We needed a ‘boring’ solution, and AlmaLinux was asked for by our users.
DJ Mountney, Engineering Manager, Distribution Build at GitLab
AlmaLinux is very excited to be the stage to GitLab’s rockstar, a product which means so much to and is trusted by millions of developers across the world. They are true friends of the Open Source community, and we are glad that our ‘boring’ solution will help give rise to the next exciting thing.
Jack Aboutboul, community manager for AlmaLinux
This is an essential step for AlmaLinux in their noble race with other distros such as Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, VzLinux, etc., in the competition to occupy the vacant niche about the role of the preferred CentOS replacement, after the withdrawal of CentOS from this position.
It’s great to see each of the above projects succeeding because that’s what open source is all about – making sure users have a choice.
