Red Hat has announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, a new version of its Enterprise Linux offering, designed to drive more consistent innovation across the open hybrid cloud.
The platform, which will be generally available in the coming weeks, is said to be built to “drive enterprise transformation in parallel with evolving market forces and customer demands in an automated and distributed IT world,” the Raleigh, N.C.-based provider of open source software said in a press release.
According to Red Hat, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the first production releaser built from CentOS Stream, the continuously delivered Linux distribution that tracks just ahead of RHEL. That move is meant to help the broader RHEL ecosystem and solicit feedback, code and feature updates from customers, users and partners.
The company cites a recent study that found that 40% of G2000 companies will reset their cloud selection process to focus on business outcomes rather than IT requirements and will place a bigger value on access to providers’ portfolio from device to edge and from data to ecosystem. For Red Hat, that suggests the importance of a standardized platform that can reach across all of those footprints and give IT teams and developers a platform optimized for operations and production.
Red Hat says customers can use RHEL broadly, and existing customers can migrate RHEL subscriptions to the cloud of their choice with Red Hat Cloud Access. Customers can deploy the platform on-demand from major cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 includes key enhancements designed to address evolving IT needs at the edge, including comprehensive edge management, a new service that oversees and scales remote deployments with greater control and security functionality, encompassing zero-touch provisioning, system health visibility and more responsive vulnerability mitigations from a single interface.
In addition, RHEL9 includes automatic container roll-back with Podman, the company’s integrated container management technology that can automatically detect if a newly updated container fails to start and roll the container back to the previous working version.
The new platform also includes a new image builder service to deliver key operating system functions as a service. RHEL 9 supports image creation for customized filesystems and major cloud providers and virtualization technologies, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and VMware.
The new platform includes RHEL’s Linux hardening features, including Red Hat Insights, the company’s proactive analytics service for detecting and remediating security issues. In addition, RHEL 9 includes features to address hardware-level security vulnerabilities, such as Spectre and Meltdown, and others to help user-space processes create memory areas that are inaccessible to potentially malicious code.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 also includes integrity measurement and architecture digital hashes and signatures to help users verify the integrity of the operating system and detect rogue infrastructure modifications. With the platform available on IBM Cloud, RHEL 9 will include the security features of IBM Power Systems and IBM Z systems.
According to Red Hat, the new version also includes an expanded set of RHEL System Role for automating workflows for specific system configurations, and it also supports kernel live patching from the RHEL web console to help IT address critical tasks at scale.
At launch, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 will include a foundation ready for key Microsoft technologies, including SQL Server.
Mathew Hicks, executive vice president of products and technologies at Red hat, said in a statement that modern IT starts with Linux.
“As the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 extends wherever needed across the open hybrid cloud and beyond, pairing the trusted backbone of enterprise Linux with the innovative catalysts of open source communities,” Hicks said. Linux is positioned at the epicenter of rapid technological evolution and that Linux is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
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