The company behind Rocky Linux, in your corner

CentOS was discontinued and enterprises needed something they could keep running. Gregory Kurtzer, who created CentOS in the first place, built Rocky Linux to fill the gap. He also founded CIQ, and CIQ has paid for the engineering ever since.

Rocky Linux is not ours to control. The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation owns the project and calls the shots. CIQ funds the work without owning it. That split is deliberate, and it means no vendor can take Rocky Linux private later. CIQ included.

File a ticket and it reaches an engineer who already knows your product and your environment. There are fewer people sitting between your first report and whoever writes the fix.

Rocky Linux LTS keeps a major version patched for five years past its final minor release, so you can settle on one build and stay there. Hardware works the same way. Every server and workstation on the certified list has been through CIQ’s own process, and the tested configuration and full report are published for each one.

CIQ builds nine products covering the kernel up to the orchestrator. Rocky Linux, plus its hardened and AI builds. Fuzzball for HPC and AI orchestration. Warewulf Pro for bare-metal provisioning. Apptainer for containers. Ascender Pro for automation.

Buy them together and you get one contract and one number to call. That matters most when a problem sits between layers. A scheduler starts behaving differently after a kernel update, or a container runtime trips over a driver. With one vendor, somebody owns it. With three, you spend a week proving whose bug it is.

CIQ software is validated with NVIDIA and AMD, and it ships in the AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle marketplaces. Our security and compliance posture is published in the Trust Center.

For regulated work, RLC Pro Hardened ships with FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography and up to 95% DISA STIG compliance out of the box, plus CIS and NIST 800-171 profiles. You start from a hardened baseline that is already documented. The alternative is hardening a general-purpose distribution yourself and then proving to an auditor that you did it right.