Red Hat drives cloud-native functions

Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.7, the final Full Support Phase release of the RHEL 7 platform. As hybrid and multicloud computing helps to transform enterprise IT, Red Hat says this version delivers enhanced consistency and control across cloud infrastructure for IT operations teams while providing a suite of modern, supported container creation tools for enterprise application developers.

Beyond new capabilities, RHEL 7.7 also marks the transition of this version to Maintenance Phase 1 within the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10-year lifecycle. Maintenance Phase 1 emphasises maintaining infrastructure stability for production environments and enhancing the reliability of the operating system. Future minor releases of RHEL 7 will now focus solely on retaining and improving this stability rather than new features.

Subscribers are able to migrate across platform versions as support and feature needs dictate. To help with the process, Red Hat offers tools, including in-place upgrades, which helps to streamline and simplify migrating from version 7 to 8.

Stefanie Chiras, vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, says: “As the hybrid cloud takes hold as a preferred production environment for mission-critical workloads, maintaining stability and consistency across all IT footprints is key. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7, we show our continued commitment to the 10-year Red Hat Enterprise Linux lifecycle while also introducing key new features, like image builder and Red Hat Insights, to help IT organizations get the most from their existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 investments.”

As interest in hybrid cloud deployments grows across the enterprise world, IT operations teams face a complex, evolving technology stack interweaving traditional applications and cloud-native services as well as virtualized, bare-metal and cloud-based resources. RHEL 7.7 adds new features to help operations teams maintain control and consistency of their workloads across environments, including:

• Red Hat Insights, Red Hat’s expertise-as-a-service offering, which helps users proactively detect, analyse and remediate a variety of potential software security and configuration issues before they cause downtime or other problems.
• Full support for image builder, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux utility that enables IT teams to more readily and easily build cloud images for major public cloud infrastructures, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
• Network performance improvements for Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack Platform by offloading virtual switching and network functions virtualization (NFV) to network controller hardware.
• Powering a cloud-native developer experience

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 is available now for current Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers via the Red Hat Customer Portal.