There was an announcement from CentOS team.  CentOS is going to farewell by the end 2021 and to be replaced by CentOS Stream.  CentOS Steam will be no longer positioned as a server OS and releases just ahead of a current RHEL version.

Original Announcement: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream – Blog.CentOS.org

This means that CentOS will stop being a stable distribution, but instead will serve as a testing ground for Red Hat.  Will you put yourself or organization to take risk?

There are thousands of organizations using CentOS not only for development but also their production servers.  It is suggested to find your own best-fit replacement before the end of support.  If you would like to have a free version of RHEL, there is still one of the nearest alternative – Oracle Linux.  Unfortunately, this distro is delivered by another technology giant – Oracle.

It is possible to have other RedHat Linux based distros, such as:

• CloudLinux – it is a RHEL rebuild distro designed for shared hosting providers. It is not a free replacement but they have announced to release 1:1 replacement for CentOS in Q1 2021.  Stay tune to see what will happen.
• Scientific Linux – it is going to die because of the deprecated from CentOS.
• Springdale Linux – another RHEL rebuild distro made by and for the academic scientific community. It is possible a choice for replacement.
• HPE ClearOS – HPE makes ClearOS available as a pre-installed option on its ProLiant server with a free community for the general public. However, it is still running on the base of RHEL 7 and with 1 version behind.  It is more likely for small business to have the OS with the HPE server for the RHEL-compatible OS.

In the market, there are still other reputable distros available and not close to CentOS:

• Debian – one of the Linux distros with the longest history and totally free with solid-rock stability
• OpenSUSE – which is the free version of SUSE and also a very stable version
• Ubuntu – one of the most popular distros for developers but with a much shorter versioning cycle; which is also expected with lower stability due to lots of new features introduced for each release.

However, you need to take some time to learn the command line interface differences for taking all the above distros.

If you would like to enjoy Linux distros totally free-of-charge, it is recommended to take Debian.  For the OpenSUSE, the popularity is far behind other distros and the community support is a bit weaker than others.  Nevertheless, Novell is maintaining SUSE and OpenSUSE very well with extremely stable environment.  For Ubuntu, it is built on top of Debian and basically without much learning curve by switching between Ubuntu and Debian.  Again, it is still recommended to take Debian instead of Ubuntu for servers.

In a nutshell, there are lots of consideration for making a move of operating system.  You should also check with your current software and application compatibility with different distros.  Unfortunately, I can’t test them all for you.  It’s your assignment to make your best-fit solution within the coming year.  Good luck!