The community is better off with the combination of AlmaLinux + CentOS Stream.
AlmaLinux provides differentiation by supporting hardware and patches that Red Hat doesn't necessarily want to.
CentOS Stream provides a way for all downstream distros (Red Hat, Alma, Oracle, Rocky, whatever) to contribute back to the ecosystem in a way that is deeper than submitting bug reports to bugzilla.redhat.com
The latter point is something people really miss. CentOS was not much of an "open source" project in the same way that Android isn't much of an "open source" project. There was few ways to contribute directly beyond filing a bug report and waiting for Red Hat / Google to handle it. CentOS Stream is vastly more open as a project.
It was never quite that, but that was the theory.
The problem is because it was an exact clone of RHEL, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to have a proper community around it. Like I said it kind of revolved around "file a bug to Red Hat, wait for someone to pick it up, and then wait more for it to be shipped, which will be months away at best and could be years if it's not a paying customer's priority"
Before that I would pay $49 a year for it.
I totally get why CentOS was useful. I was briefly involved with Rocky when it first was getting started.
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2022/07/06/what-quali...
But RHEL is free for limited production purposes also, to a maximum of 16 systems.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-introduces-free-rhel-f...
That process began happening long before the IBM acquisition when Red Hat hired Karanbir Singh (CentOS's maintainer) in 2014.
IIRC, I saw something about it on HN at the time, but did not read it, being busy.
So they acquihired CentOS, but in doing that they changed its target from "community of users [that don't want to pay for RHEL]" to "community of developers that target RHEL". CentOS Stream is much better (though not perfect) for the latter population.
That said, there are many people using CentOS Stream in production (including myself).
I'm biased (co-founder) but you should take a look at Infisical for secret management: https://infisical.com
Speaking for myself, but I do not get any monetary compensation from IBM and I suspect this is true for all of the other non-IBM contributors.
[0]: https://github.com/openbao/openbao/releases/tag/v2.0.0-alpha...
Finding conceptual forks, e.g. $(git push --mirror ...) would be trickier but I bet sourcegraph could do it
Ultimately, the question boils down to: what risk are you driving down: hitching your wagon to a dead stack, not getting security updates, not getting PRs merged, $other?
Before jumping straight into production k8s, something you can mess around with is using Podman to generate[0] and run[1] Kubernetes resources that you can parse through and familiarize yourself with. Paired with Podman Desktop[2] can produce a nice graphical environment. After that you could take a look at more production-simulating environments with minikube[3], OpenShift Local[4] (very much recommend if you have the resources to run it), and the no-cost OpenShift Sandbox[5].
In general, the Red Hat Developer[6] site has a lot of good resources to learn from, both passive and interactive. I highly recommend going through the courses and tutorials available if it can help your team skill up (assuming k8s is the direction you want to go in).
[0] https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-generate.1....
[1] https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-kube.1.html
[2] https://podman.io/features | https://podman-desktop.io/
[3] https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/
[4] https://developers.redhat.com/products/openshift-local/overv...
Terraform users can pick up their new alternative here:
https://opentofu.org/
and for those of you with Vault, you can find your new alternative here:
https://openbao.org/