Red Hat today announced an update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that automates a wide range of manual tasks.
Scott McBrien, a principal product manager for Red Hat, said RHEL 8.3, available in a few weeks, expands the Red Hat System Roles capability that provides a prescriptive and automated means of managing operating system configurations. Red Hat System Role now addresses kernel and log settings, identity management, certificate management and Network-Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE), as well as deployments of SAP HANA databases and SAP NetWeaver middleware. Red Hat has also updated Tuned, a set of pre-configured performance profiles it makes available.
In addition, RHEL 8.3 provides an update to Application Streams, a set of developer frameworks, databases, container tools and other resources that now adds support for Node.js 14, Ruby 2.7 and other current versions of tools and languages. Red Hat is now committed to streaming support for updates to the frameworks include in Application Streams versus only making updates available each time the entire platform is updated, said McBrien. That approach is intended to make it possible for developers to embrace new capabilities faster while maintaining support for previous versions of frameworks, said McBrien.
Red Hat is also furthering its effort to encourage organizations that have standardized on RHEL to embrace its tools for building and managing container applications. Updated container images for Buildah, a tool for building container images and Skopeo, a tool for moving container images across storage platform, have been added along with version 2.0 of Podman, a tool for managing containers and images that adds a REST application programming interface (API) that is compatible with Docker Container Engine.
Red Hat is making the cases for a more modular approach to deploying tools for building and maintaining containers as an alternative to a more monolithic approach pursued by Docker Inc., said McBrien.
Finally, Red Hat has added Secure Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) profiles for the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
RHEL and the Red Hat OpenShift application development and deployment platform are at the core of the hybrid cloud computing strategy being advanced by Red Hat and its parent company, IBM. According to a Red Hat Enterprise Open Source Report, 63% of organizations surveyed have a hybrid cloud architecture today, with more than half of those who do not have one in place planning to implement one in the next two years.
Beyond bundling developer tools with RHEL to reduce the number of IT vendors, an organization needs to engage, McBrien said Red Hat is committed to automating as many low-level IT tasks as possible. IT teams should be able to deploy operating systems in the cloud just as easily as they might in an on-premises IT environment, he noted.
It may be a little while yet before every manual IT task becomes automated, but with each new update to the operating system the number of those rote tasks that IT administrators need to devote time to continues to diminish.
