10 Big Announcements From Red Hat Summit 2022

RHEL 9 will feature new capabilities around edge computing, security and automation.

IBM subsidiary Red Hat used its annual Summit event to whet developers’ appetite for the upcoming newest version of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, providing more information on RHEL 9’s new capabilities around edge computing, security and automation.

Red Hat Summit, held this week virtually and in person in Boston, also included announcements for the Raleigh, N.C.-based company’s OpenShift containerized software suite, more validated patterns to speed up edge architecture building and updates on the Ansible Automation Platform.

The summit also shared the calendar with Red Hat parent IBM’s annual Think event, which was also held virtually and in Boston.

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More than 5,000 certified partner applications are delivered by hundreds of independent software providers (ISVs), according to Red Hat. These applications focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, development operations (DevOps), networking and other areas.

Red Hat has proven key to IBM’s hybrid cloud growth strategy, with the tech giant reporting an increase of 21 percent year over year to Red Hat revenue during its latest quarterly earnings report.

IBM’s consulting wing about doubled its Red Hat-related signings year over year, with the Red Hat practice amassing a nearly $4.5 billion book of business from inception to date.

Recently appointed Red Hat channel chief Stefanie Chiras told CRN in an interview this year that technologies enabling edge computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning are some of the major technologies partners will see the company invest in.

Here’s what you need to know.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 operating system becomes generally available “in the coming weeks,” according to the company.

RHEL 9 promises a more consistent experience across the open hybrid cloud, from bare-metal servers to public clouds and enterprise network edges. Customers will have the ability to choose underlying architecture, application vendor or cloud provider, according to the company.

This latest RHEL release is built from CentOS Stream, the continuously delivered Linux distribution that tracks ahead of RHEL. By building from CentOS Stream, the broader RHEL ecosystem, including partners, have an easier time providing feedback, code and feature updates, according to Red Hat.

When RHEL 9 does become generally available, it will come with enhancements aimed at edge computing, according to Red Hat.

RHEL 9 will offer comprehensive edge management delivered as a service, according to Red Hat. This service will allow users to oversee and scale remote deployments with greater security and control functionality. Users will have zero-touch provisioning, system health visibility and more responsive vulnerability mitigations from a single interface.

The latest RHEL version will also have automatic container rollback with the Podman integrated container management technology, according to Red Hat. Podman can automatically detect if a newly updated container fails to start, then rolling the container back to the previous working version.

RHEL 9 also has a new image builder service that works with customized file systems and major cloud providers and virtualization technologies, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and VMware.

A simplified installer to deploy systems with greater security remotely at the edge or at a central data center is another key feature, according to Red Hat. RHL 9 will have a FIDO Device Onboarding (FDO) technology preview meant to reduce time and costs for edge deployments and a Gnome Kiosk Mode for graphical environments with only essential components.

RHEL 9 promises to protect against hardware-level security vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown, according to Red Hat.

The operating system has the ability to help user-space processes create memory areas inaccessible to malicious code and RHEL 9 provides readiness for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other customer security requirements.

RHEL 9’s integrity measurement architecture (IMA) digital hashes and signatures create a new way for users to detect rogue infrastructure modifications, according to the company.

The new version of RHEL will have an expanded set of system roles that can provide an automated workflow for specific configurations.

RHEL 9 will offer system roles for Postfix, high-availability clusters, firewall, Microsoft SQL Server, web console and more.

Kernel live patching from the RHEL web console will allow IT operations teams to apply updates across large, distributed system deployments without accessing command-line tooling, according to Red Hat. This should simplify how teams address issues from the core data center to multiple clouds to the edge.

Ken Goetz, Red Hat’s vice president of customer success, recently told CRN in an interview that the company has launched new dynamic skills paths for partner training, including paths for infrastructure modernization, IT automation, migrations, upgrades, container management, accelerating application development and other use cases.

Red Hat announced two new edge partners in its ecosystem during the summit.

Red Hat-certified systems now work with edge computers from South Burlington, Vt.-based OnLogic, whose offerings include small, fanless industrial computers and high-powered, rugged computers that can handle artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads.

Intel Next Unit of Computing (NUC) Element modules are now certified for RHEL 8 and 9.

A certification for RHEL edge systems is also available to help partners with enticing customer interest in edge. Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo and other partners offer RHEL edge certified technology and expertise, according to Red Hat.

Red Hat announced updates to its OpenShift containerized software suite, including more consistent capabilities from edge to core to cloud with OpenShift Platform Plus.

Red Hat OpenShift 4.10, released in March, has zero-touch provisioning, which aims to allow repeatable, automated set up of edge systems. Zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) includes factory workflows for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

Manufacturers can preload relocatable OpenShift clusters on preferred hardware, giving customers a fully operational, pre-installed cluster for faster delivery of radio access networks (RANs), according to Red Hat.

Other OpenShift edge updates include topologies management with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management. Users can manage single-node OpenShift clusters, remote worker nodes and three-node compact clusters, according to Red Hat. One Advanced Cluster Management hub cluster can deploy and manage 2,000 single-node OpenShift clusters.

Red Hat Edge received new validated patterns for IT teams that need to build edge architectures quickly.

Included is a medical diagnosis pattern that uses Git operations (GitOps) to help health care providers ingest, analyze and act upon medical images and data.

A multicloud GitOps pattern is aimed at organizations that run workloads on different clusters on different clouds, public or private, according to Red Hat.

The Ansible Automation Platform from Red Hat has a new automation mesh visualization to show where automations run to provide scaling wherever needed, according to Red Hat.

Users can scale capacity as edge environments grow and bring automation closer to edge workflows, according to Red Hat.

Ansible Automation Platform’s recent re-architecture should also simplify automation deployment at scale across hybrid clouds and edge environments, according to Red Hat.

In December, Ansible Automation Platform 2.1 became available, with capabilities around automation scaling, diverse environment connection and new developer tools for automation content.

Red Hat announced a collaboration with General Motors to expand the ecosystem for the IBM subsidiary’s in-vehicle operating system, which is a Linux OS foundation for GM’s Ultifi software platform launching in 2023.

Red Hat ‘s cloud-native, enterprise-grade, open-source OS promises to speed up vehicle application updates with continuous safety certification, according to the company. As a Linux-based system, Ultifi should be usable for almost any GM developers, suppliers and developers.

The integrated software should support infotainment, advanced driver assistance systems, body control, connectivity and other in-vehicle safety and non-safety-related apps, according to Red Hat.

IBM subsidiary Red Hat and recent IBM spinoff Kyndryl announced a strategic partnership and integrated services and solutions based on the Ansible Automation Platform.

Kyndryl – formerly IBM’s managed infrastructure services business – will use Ansible Automation Platform as the primary enterprise automation solution across its infrastructure services, according to a statement.

New York-based Kyndryl will be the leading service provider for Ansible Automation Platform. It already runs tens of millions of automations and manages more than 500,000 customer endpoints worldwide. Kyndryl and Red Hat jointly support about 900 customers worldwide.

Red Hat and Kyndryl will work together to build out new storage and network automation capabilities across the Kyndryl services team. The two companies will also establish an Ansible Innovation Center to co-create services and jointly develop playbooks, enablement and support.

Kyndryl services practitioners have more than 5,000 Red Hat certifications and accreditations to date, according to the company.

9 Biggest Things To Know About Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

RHEL 8 is another reason for channel partners to talk about Linux with customers, said Gunnar Hellekson, senior director of product management at Red Hat.

Red Hat today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8), the first major update of its flagship Linux open-source software operating system and IT infrastructure platform in five years.

The latest platform, heralded at the Red Hat Summit taking place in Boston through Thursday, comes with new features to more easily and explicitly enable hybrid-cloud deployment and ensure a customer’s continued operational consistency, even as they embrace new infrastructures, according to the Raleigh, N.C., open-source software company, which is slated to get IBM as its parent company under a $34 billion deal expected to close later this year.

RHEL 8 is another reason for channel partners to talk about Linux with customers, said Gunnar Hellekson, senior director of product management at Red Hat.

“The IT market is going through this transformation right now being driven by two big forces: One is cloud computing and infrastructure, and the other is containers and what that means for application development and deployment,” Hellekson said. “The nice thing about those two dynamics is that they're both rooted in Linux. Red Hat, of course, is the Linux leader with the majority of commercial Linux offerings out there.”

Red Hat had revealed the public beta of the RHEL 8 platform as a foundation for hybrid cloud deployments -- from enterprise data centers, bare-metal servers and Linux containers to public cloud and private clouds -- in November.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expected to impact more than $10 trillion in global business revenues in 2019, according to a Red Hat-sponsored IDC report.

Continue reading for a look at the new RHEL 8 features.

Existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers can upgrade to RHEL 8, and that upgrade will be more seamless than in the past, according to Red Hat.

“Traditionally, it has not been as smooth as we would have liked,” Hellekson said. “But with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, this was an explicit design goal to allow for what we call in-place upgrades – that is, being able to take a running machine, run some commands, run the in-place upgrade tools on that machine and have that machine update itself to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. That was something we worked very hard on making possible.”

With the release of RHEL 8, Red Hat Insights will become a core part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription at no extra cost.

Formerly sold as a freestanding product, Red Hat Insights is a hosted service that provides customers coaching on the configuration and performance of their systems, according to Hellekson.

The software-as-a-service offering provides continuous, predictive analysis of registered Red Hat-based systems to proactively identify technical threats to security, performance and stability across hybrid infrastructures, and automated remediation to help administrators resolve problems and avoid costly unplanned downtime.

“We take everything we've learned in our support system, all of our knowledge base articles and our own in-house technical and architectural expertise, and using this Insights service, we can take a look at how a customer has deployed and configured their RHEL systems and give them advice,” Hellekson said. “Rather than a traditional support model where we wait for them to call us with a problem, we're actually actively offering the guidance on how to best run their RHEL systems.”

“The idea is that every month, somebody should be able to get new advice and new coaching through that Red Hat Insights feature,” he said. “So it’s just not a matter of getting the software and keeping it updated, we’re also providing you with a steady stream of new advice over the lifetime of the product.”

To resolve the challenge of getting the most up-to-date language and frameworks for developers without compromising RHEL production stability, Red Hat has introduced Application Streams. Fast-moving languages, frameworks and developer tools are updated frequently in this stream without impacting core resources.

With every major release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux seems to grow in size by about 50 percent, because customers have become accustomed to trusting their operating system as a source of secure software, according to Hellekson.

“We just don’t ship an operating system,” he said. “Included in the Red Hat Linux subscription is stuff like new programming languages, web servers, (domain name system) servers, all kinds of different tools that people need to run an infrastructure.”

While each Red Hat Linux version has a 10-year life cycle, programming languages advance much more quickly than a traditional operating system.

“Acknowledging this kind of split responsibility, we've now split the operating system into kind of a base operating system, and then what we're calling Application Streams,” Hellekson said. “Application Streams…allows us to more frequently update the software that needs to be updated more frequently. This prevents something like Firefox from getting too old just by virtue of that fact that it was included in the operating system.”

The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux Web Console is designed to lower the barrier of entry for people new to Linux by making system administration management and monitoring tasks easier.

“For years…we've been designing Linux systems on the assumption that there's going to be someone sitting in front of it with a mouse and keyboard,” Hellekson said. “This is a graphical interface that allows you to kind of point and click and do routine maintenance, check on performance, check on your virtual machine.”

RHEL 8 also includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles.

System Roles are pre-configured Ansible modules that enable ready-made automated workflows for handling common, complex system administrator tasks around managing and configuring Linux in production. They’re designed to help eliminate human error as the cause of common configuration issues.

Red Hat began introducing System Roles with RHEL 7 – it was made available as a technology preview with RHEL 7.4 – but it’s made a big investment for RHEL 8, according to Hellekson.

“What System Roles provides is a consistent interface for doing those routine tasks, an interface that allows automated configuration and management systems to go perform things like setting up time servers or setting up a DNS system,” Hellekson said. “And we're making a promise that that interface will stay consistent across major versions of the operating system. In the past, if you were deploying a new version of the operating system, you'd have to go back and kind of retool.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 supports the OpenSSL 1.1.1 and TLS 1.3 cryptographic standards to enhance security. Cryptographic protection can be implemented system-wide with a single command, limiting the need for application-specific policies and tuning.

Some customers have regulatory requirements to use only certain kinds of encryption in their systems. To comply with those regulations, it has historically meant searching through hundreds of configuration files on the system to make sure that each component was using the right cryptography policy part, Hellekson said.

“We've now consolidated all that into one place, so you can set your cryptography policy in one place and have that enforced all the way across a system, which should save people a considerable amount of time, especially if they’re in regulated environments,” he said.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 delivers full support for the Red Hat container toolkit, which provides technologies for creating, running and sharing containerized applications. Based on open standards, it includes tools like Buildah, Podman, Skopeo and others.

“These container tools are now the default container tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and because each tool is kind of assigned to a particular purpose, it improves the security of the container infrastructure,” Hellekson said. “The same software is the software that OpenShift is going to use when they're operating a kind of full-scale container orchestration infrastructure.”

One of the challenges that operators have in hybrid environments is creating consistent images.

“Operators are accustomed to working in terms of gold images – ‘I’m going to get a system configured in exactly the right way, and then I’m going to just go deploy 1,000 copies of that golden image,’” Hellekson explained. “That becomes more complicated when you're in the hybrid world, because not everything you’re deploying on looks exactly the same. Physical servers are going to look different than a virtual machine is going to look different than a public cloud.”

The Image Builder tool allows for the creation of Blueprints for what an operating system is going to look like.

“Using this Image Builder tool, an operator should be able to more easily get a consistent operating environment, regardless of what infrastructure they're running on, whereas before, that was a very manual, labor-intensive task,” Hellekson said. “You hit one button, and it creates a version based on that Blueprint that is for physical servers, and another button will create one for a virtual machine, and another for an Amazon public cloud.”

Red Hat also announced that the Red Hat Universal Base Image for building enterprise-ready containerized applications is now generally available to all developers with or without a RHEL subscription.

Applications built with the Universal Base Image can be run anywhere, but will come with RHEL benefits and support from Red Hat when run on RHEL or the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

“Because Red Hat Linux is so popular, people want to be able to build their applications on top of a Red Hat Linux Enterprise base image,” Hellekson said. “But people don't always want to run their computer on RHEL, so it doesn't really make sense to force everybody to buy a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This allows folks who, for example, are working in the upstream in the open-source communities, (to) build their application on top of the universal base image and deploy it wherever they want. It’s free, and it’s freely distributable.”