CentOS Stream 10 Minimal, the free, continuously delivered upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, with the desktop era and support tooling a headless server never uses removed.
CentOS Stream is a free, open source Linux distribution maintained by the CentOS Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Stream 10 is the continuously delivered development branch that sits just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, so it tracks what the next RHEL 10 update will contain while remaining binary compatible with the RHEL 10 platform.
This is the Minimal edition: the Cockpit web console, the tuned tuning daemon, the sosreport support collector and the boot splash are removed, along with firmware and GeoIP datasets a Hyper-V guest has no use for. The result is a smaller installed package set and a smaller surface to patch and audit, with everything the platform needs to boot, network, authenticate and update itself kept intact.
The cloudimg image is a minimal CentOS Stream 10 base with current security patches applied at build time and no baked in credentials: access is by the SSH key you choose at launch, so no two instances share a secret. Unattended updates are armed and proven on a real dry run before the image ships, so the machine keeps patching itself after launch. It gives you a lean, trustworthy RHEL 10 compatible starting point rather than a bare install, backed by 24/7 support.