AlmaLinux is a free and open source Linux distribution, developed by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, a 501(c) organization, to provide a community-supported, production-grade enterprise operating system that is binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

On December 8, 2020, Red Hat announced that development of CentOS, a free-of-cost downstream fork of the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), would be discontinued and its official support would be cut short to focus on CentOS Stream, a stable LTS release without minor releases officially used by Red Hat to preview what is intended for inclusion in updates to RHEL.

[4][5][6] In response, CloudLinux – which maintains its own commercial Linux distribution, CloudLinux OS – announced that it would back AlmaLinux to provide a community-supported spiritual successor to CentOS Linux,[7] aiming for binary-compatibility with the current version of RHEL.

[17] On December 7, 2022, it was announced that CERN and Fermilab would be providing AlmaLinux as the standard operating system for their experiments.

[22] In September 2021, the AlmaLinux project announced a tool called ELevate that would allow in-place upgrades between major versions of enterprise Linux distributions.

In addition, the service exposes an API that allows repositories to be directly consumed by the rest of ALBS.

Corresponding with the Master Service, the Build Node's purpose is to perform the compilation of source code stored in the Git repositories to create RPM packages that can later be used as part of the distribution installation process.

In order to ensure integrity, each software package that is released for the AlmaLinux distribution is digitally-signed using the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) cryptographic algorithm.

After AlmaLinux opted to shift their focus to remaining RHEL compatible, they first released bug and security flaw fixes ahead of Red Hat the next month with patches for Zenbleed.