CentOS Stream 9 on Azure | 24/7 Support

CentOS Stream 9 on Azure

CentOS Stream 9 is the free, open-source Linux distribution maintained by the CentOS Project and sponsored by Red Hat. It is the continuously-delivered development branch that sits just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, tracking what the next RHEL 9 update will contain while remaining binary compatible with the RHEL 9 platform. The operating system IS the product: no application is preinstalled, so it boots ready for you to build your own services on.

Why the cloudimg image

This is a minimal, clean CentOS Stream 9 base with current security patches applied at build time and no baked-in credentials: access is by the SSH key you choose at launch, so no two instances share a secret. SELinux runs enforcing, password authentication is disabled and the root account is locked. The Azure Linux Agent (waagent), cloud-init and chronyd are preconfigured for Azure provisioning and time sync. The standard BaseOS, AppStream and CRB repositories stay enabled so you roll forward within the Stream 9 package set on your own schedule.

Common use cases

• Tracking and testing against the next RHEL 9 update ahead of general availability
• A RHEL 9 compatible base for development, CI and staging environments
• Building and validating RPMs against the RHEL 9 development stream
• Container and Kubernetes workloads

Licensing and support

CentOS Stream is free and open source (GPLv2 and a collection of upstream open-source licences); there is no OS licence or subscription fee. The cloudimg charge ($0.04 per vCPU/hour) covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 expert support.