Based directly on RHEL (Red-Hat Enterprise Linux), it's updated at the same time as RHEL. The support is provided by the community unlike RHEL whose support is provided by RedHat.

It's similar to Red Hat, but you don't have to pay.

CentOS favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else.

Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and are ensured to play well with each-other.

This strategy has paid off quite a lot in the past. One example is the Heartbleed bug which left CentOS unaffected since it was using a two-year old OpenSSL library which did not have the bug.

Since CentOS backports all updates and bug fixes to older versions in order to maintain package compatibility across releases, applications hosted on Red Hat Linux don't have to worry about potential breaking changes in libraries they use, especially language libraries.

CentOS has several built-in solutions for disaster recovery. For example, it comes with pacemaker which can be configured to manage multi-site and and stretch clusters across multiple geographical locations for disaster recovery and scalability. It can also be configured to trigger notifications when the status of a managed cluster changes by using enhanced pacemaker alerts.

Comes with built-in management tools for containers (Atomic CLI, Cockpit) and a container runtime in the form of Docker engine.