Although differentiation is tough in Linux distributions today, CentOS 7 has carved out a niche as the free and open alter ego to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). We found that CentOS, which is mandated to be binary-compatible with Red Hat 7, shares about 95% of the features of its commercial enterprise-class sibling.
There’s no IBM System z port, and special variants for cloud and virtualization are more limited than with Red Hat 7. But for many common and generic applications, it’s a drop-in replacement.