CentOS is a free and open-source crowd based computer platform that is functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). CentOS officially joined Red Hat in January 2014, while remaining independent of RHEL, under through a new CentOS executive council.
CentOS version 2 was released in May 2004 after being cloned from RHEL version 2.1AS.
CentOS has fully endorsed the x86-64, ARM64, and POWER8 architectures since version 8, although previous releases supported the IA-32 platform as well. AltArch editions of CentOS 7 are available for the IA-32 architecture, Power ISA, and the ARMv7hl and AArch64 variations of the ARM architecture as of December 2015. On September 24, 2019, CentOS 8 was released.