Red Hat Simplifies Standard Operating Environments Across the Hybrid Cloud with Latest Version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat, Inc. announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 brings a wide range of new and enhanced capabilities to better manage the complexity of hybrid cloud computing in an increasingly AI-centric world, including refined management and automation and proactive support in building standard operating environments (SOEs) for distributed systems.

According to a recent survey by Red Hat partner Dynatrace, 88% of organizations responded that their technology stack has increased in complexity over the past 12 months, with more than half saying that this complexity will only continue to increase in the future. For Red Hat, this means making Linux platforms more accessible, more manageable and more user-friendly is crucial to help limit how the operating system contributes to this spike in complexity.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, and the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10, show Red Hat’s continued commitment to lowering the barriers of entry to Linux in general, as well as making it more manageable and scalable to address evolving demands.

Bringing proactive guidance to Red Hat Insights

Standardizing foundational IT technologies can effectively be a force multiplier, as teams can use the same skills, workflows, tools and commands across a wide range of disparate environments. But building, let alone maintaining, an SOE is no small feat – this is where updates to Red Hat Insights image builder can help.

Available soon, Insights will be able to proactively provide recommendations and information in creating SOE images based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It will also be able to analyze selected packages and recommend related, relevant packages to also be included, and can help find packages that are not available in the currently selected repositories. Insights image builder also now highlights relevant life cycle information for Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions, helping systems administrators and operations teams be aware of upcoming life cycle milestones and prepare for possible upgrades.

Additionally, the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console virtual assistant can help guide users in creating Red Hat Enterprise Linux images, enabling custom content and even launching Red Hat Enterprise Linux images on supported cloud providers.

Lowering Linux barriers through automation

Automation is increasingly a critical part of an operation team’s toolbox, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 continues Red Hat’s drive to make automation an integral part of modern Linux platforms. 9.4 further extends Red Hat Enterprise Linux system roles, deployment-ready Ansible content collections that help configure and launch common administrative tasks. New system roles-related capabilities include:

• System roles at the edge through rpm-ostree, which enable users to automate operating system-level tasks at the edge, such as Podman for deploying product-ready container workloads.
• A fapolicyd system role to automate allowing or denying application executions at scale, removing the potential for human error in possible breach escalations.
• A snapshot system role for administrators to create and manage point-in-time snapshots of logical volume manager (LVM) storage volumes, which helps speed up backup and recovery solutions in a more repeatable and predictable manner at scale.
• A bootloader system role to help configure the kernel command line itself, which helps improve the consistency and management of Linux systems at scale.

Expanding the hardware ecosystem

Choice is a fundamental component of the hybrid cloud, starting at the hardware architecture level. Red Hat remains committed to offering a wide range of hardware ecosystem options, and with the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, the platform now offers full support for the Arm® architecture. Previously in Technology Preview, support is now provided for Arm 64-based server platform hosts running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 Arm 64 guests with 64k page sizes.

Availability

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 is now available for existing Red Hat customers via the Red Hat Customer Portal. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10 will be available in the coming weeks via the Customer Portal as well.