How IBM’s Red Hat Acquisition Redefines the Cloud - Enterprise Linux 8 is here!
Four years ago Red Hat released its flagship product - RHEL 7 - dominating the Enterprise Linux world. Now the much anticipated major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, promises to be just as popular with today’s cloud and container-based IT world. Join Red Hat Solutions Architect, John Walter, as he walks through the game-changing features and benefits of this new release. As a member of Red Hat’s training and certification team, John will discuss concepts covered in RH354, the training course developed to support RHEL 8. This new course is valuable to operators, managers, system administrators and other IT professionals currently working with RHEL 7 and looking to migrate to RHEL 8.
IBM recently announced its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. This blockbuster deal signals a sea change in cloud as IT managers broaden their view of what cloud is and how it’s most effectively deployed. With Red Hat, IBM is positioned to lead in the multi cloud world.
Prior to this acquisition, IBM already was a full-featured cloud provider, with both on-prem and cloud-based elements in their portfolio.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8: New Features and Benefits Overview
With Red Hat, IBM now adds two new dimensions:
Fluid application and data migration: Red Hat brings Linux-based tools, including containers, the OpenShift container platform, and Kubernetes orchestration. Part of the multi cloud promise is to make clouds interchangeable with seamless workload and data migration. This helps make that possible.
Multi-cloud interoperability: Orchestration, of course, is only half of the puzzle. The other half is broad platform interoperability, something the open source Red Hat platform was built to deliver.
Why Enabling the Multi Cloud Matters
TECHNICAL INTRODUCTION TO RHEL 8 Ron Marshall Senior Solutions Architect February 2019
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, the operating system designed to span the breadth of deployments across enterprise IT. For any workload running on any environment, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 delivers one enterprise Linux experience to meet the unique technology needs of evolving enterprises. From deploying new Linux workloads into production to launching digital transformation strategies, the next-generation enterprise is built on top of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.
Spanning the entirety of the hybrid cloud, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform provides a catalyst for IT organizations to do more than simply meet today’s challenges; it gives them the foundation and tools to launch their own future, wherever they want it to be.
Stefanie Chirasvice President And General Manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is the operating system redesigned for the hybrid cloud era and built to support the workloads and operations that stretch from enterprise datacenters to multiple public clouds. Red Hat understands that the operating system should do more than simply exist as part of a technology stack; it should be the catalyst for innovation.
5 new features of RHEL8 in 12 minutes
RHEL 8 - The intelligent OS for Hybrid Cloud
Any Cloud Any Workload One OS
In this demo managed by Michele Naldini - Senior Solution Architect we'll briefly review 5 new features of Rhel 8:
1) new cockpit interface
2) use podman to start a rootless containers (managed by unprivileged user)
3) use buildah to build a custom image starting from UBI (universal base images): https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html-single/building_running_and_managing_containers/index#how_are_ubi_images_different
4) build a blueprint and custom rhel images from cockpit to use any app any where
5) terminal recording with tlog to enhance security and review activities performed on your rhel system
For an extended list of new features and enhancements see https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/8.0_release_notes/new-features
From Linux containers and hybrid cloud to DevOps and artificial intelligence (AI), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is built to not just support enterprise IT in the hybrid cloud, but to help these new technology strategies thrive.
As the importance of hybrid cloud and multicloud deployments grow, the operating system must evolve as well. According to IDC1, 70 percent of customers already deploy multicloud environments and 64 percent of applications in a typical IT portfolio today are based in a cloud environment, whether public or private. Red Hat views the operating system as the keystone to this IT innovation and more, especially as Red Hat Enterprise Linux is poised to impact more than $10 trillion in global business revenues in 2019, according to a Red Hat-sponsored IDC report.
Agile Integration with APIs and Containers Workshop
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8: Intelligent Linux for the hybrid cloud
For more than 15 years, Red Hat has helped enterprises innovate on Linux, first in their datacenters and now across the hybrid cloud. As datacenters grow in scale and scope and workload complexity builds, the skills required to deploy and maintain Linux-based production systems become increasingly critical. With the announcement of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, this intelligence and expertise is now built-in to Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions by default with Red Hat Insights, delivering Red Hat’s Linux expertise as-a-service.
See how Red Hat’s newest tools and technologies help customers conquer their own audacious goals—the same way they’ve helped us attain ours.
Hear Red Hat's executive vice president and president, Products and Technologies, discuss Red Hat's three bold goals, the objectives our customers have set out to accomplish, and what results they've achieved so far. Plus, we recognize the individual efforts of this year's Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 - May 8 - Red Hat Summit 2019
Red Hat Insights helps proactively identify and remediate IT issues, from security vulnerabilities to stability problems. It uses predictive analytics based on Red Hat’s vast knowledge of open technologies to help administrators avoid problems and unplanned downtime in production environments.
Managing systems dispersed across a variety of on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure can present a significant challenge to IT organizations. Red Hat Smart Management, a layered add-on for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, helps IT teams gain the benefits of hybrid cloud computing while minimizing its inherent management complexities. Combining Red Hat Satellite for on-premise systems management and cloud management services for distributed Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments, Red Hat Smart Management provides rich capabilities to manage, patch, configure and provision Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments across the hybrid cloud.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8: Blazing a faster path to modern applications
To meet evolving business demands, IT organizations are looking to new workloads, from artificial intelligence (AI) to the Internet-of-Things (IoT), to drive competitive advantages in crowded marketplaces. Linux provides the innovative muscle to power these differentiated services, but only Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 delivers this innovation along with a hardened code base, extensive security updates, award-winning support and a vast ecosystem of tested and validated supporting technologies.
Best practices for optimizing Red Hat platforms for large scale datacenter deployments on DGX systems
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has always been known as the most stable and secure foundation for applications. However, in the past it was hard to get the most up-to-date languages and frameworks that developers wanted without compromising that stability. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 introduces Application Streams - fast-moving languages, frameworks and developer tools are updated frequently in this stream without impacting the core resources that have made Red Hat Enterprise Linux an enterprise benchmark. This melds faster developer innovation with production stability in a single, enterprise-class operating system.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8: Introducing a world of opportunity for everyone
Linux continues to be the number one operating system for developers building the next generation of enterprise applications. As these applications move into production, stability, enhanced security and testing/certification on existing hardware and environments become paramount needs. This shifts the onus from developers to operations teams and, paired with the trend of Linux being looked to as a primary platform for production applications, makes Linux administration and management skills critical for modern datacenters. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is designed to lower the barrier to entry for Linux, enabling greater accessibility for Windows administrators, Linux beginners and new systems administrators without fear of the command line.
Using Leapp and Boom to Upgrade to the RHEL 8
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 abstracts away many of the deep complexities of granular sysadmin tasks behind the Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console. The console provides an intuitive, consistent graphical interface for managing and monitoring Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, from the health of virtual machines to overall system performance. To further improve ease of use, Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports in-place upgrades, providing a more streamlined, efficient and timely path for users to convert Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 instances to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 systems.
Triangle Kubernetes Meetup - Performance Sensitive Apps in OpenShift
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 also includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles, which automate many of the more complex tasks around managing and configuring Linux in production. Powered by Red Hat Ansible Automation, System Roles are pre-configured Ansible modules that enable ready-made automated workflows for handling common, complex sysadmin tasks. This automation makes it easier for new systems administrators to adopt Linux protocols and helps to eliminate human error as the cause of common configuration issues.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Enabling the world of possibilities without sacrificing security
IT innovation is rooted in open source, with Linux often serving as the catalyst for major advancements in enterprise technology, from Linux containers and Kubernetes to serverless and AI. Backed by a more secure, hardened open source supply chain, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 helps pave the way for IT organizations to adopt production-ready innovation by deploying only the necessary packages for specific workloads. This enhances the adoption of emerging technologies while helping to minimize potential risk.
To enhance security, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 supports the OpenSSL 1.1.1 and TLS 1.3 cryptographic standards. This provides access to the strongest, latest standards in cryptographic protection that can be implemented system-wide via a single command, limiting the need for application-specific policies and tuning.
With cloud-native applications and services frequently driving digital transformation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 delivers full support for the Red Hat container toolkit. Based on open standards, the toolkit provides technologies for creating, running and sharing containerized applications. It helps to streamline container development and eliminates the need for bulky, less secure container daemons.
Every datacenter. Every cloud. Every application.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 drives a thriving partner ecosystem, as is expected of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, encompassing thousands of certified applications, Linux container images, hardware configurations and cloud providers. Building on the deep partnerships forged by Red Hat with other IT leaders and through extensive testing, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 drives added value for specific hardware configurations and workloads, including the Arm and POWER architectures as well as real-time applications and SAP solutions.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 forms the foundation for Red Hat’s entire hybrid cloud portfolio, starting with Red Hat OpenShift 4 and the upcoming Red Hat OpenStack Platform 15. Also built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, a minimal footprint operating system designed to host Red Hat OpenShift deployments.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is also broadly supported as a guest operating system on Red Hat hybrid cloud infrastructure, including Red Hat OpenShift 4, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 15 and Red Hat Virtualization 4.3.
Enabling the multi-cloud may seem like a curious move for a cloud provider. After all, it makes it easier for your customers to go to the competition! But it’s a savvy move for two reasons:
Users are going to the multi-cloud anyway
In a recent IDC survey, IT managers report that 75% of workloads would ideally run in a diverse cloud world, not just on a single public cloud. The customers will go to the provider that enables their preferred model.
Multi Cloud combines public cloud and private cloud
Enabling the multi cloud drives dominance
Being open actually drives customers to you. Gartner stated this about the multi cloud:
“Most organizations will pursue a multi cloud strategy, although most will also designate a primary cloud provider for a particular purpose, and are likely to have 80% or more of those types of workloads in their primary provider.”
By this thinking, the vendor who best enables the multi-cloud will also reap the preponderance of the revenue.
Cloudian Delivers on the Multi Cloud Vision Today
Cloudian has been promoting the multi cloud vision since January 2018. With the launch of HyperStore 7, Cloudian began supporting multi cloud deployments across private cloud and public clouds including AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Cloudian links divergent environments with:
A single view of data, combining private + public clouds
Common API across clouds
Single-point management
IBM, in fact, mirrored these same values in their Red Hat announcement. Here’s a deal summary, annotated with Cloudian points:
IBM Red Hat multi cloud benefits mirror Cloudian object storage benefits
HyperStore 7 Converges the Clouds
HyperStore 7 is a scale-out object storage platform and multi-cloud controller in a single software image. Deployed on prem or in the cloud, it enables all cloud types:
Private cloud: Deploy on-prem or as a hosted private cloud for scalable storage
Hybrid cloud: Link to any cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) and replicate or migrate data using policy-based tools — without middleware or 3rd party software
Multi cloud: Deploy in multiple clouds to provide single-API connectivity and a common management framework
Combine these capabilities to create whatever management model your use case demands.
Multicloud architecture combines object storage and cloud interoperability
The Multi-Cloud Takes Shape
With Red Hat, IBM has advanced the multi-cloud conversation, further validating an important market direction. Ultimately, both consumers and cloud providers will benefit as open solutions expand the possibilities for everyone.
In the early days of cloud, the providers were walled gardens with unique APIs and proprietary management tools. The web also started as a walled garden (anyone remember Prodigy and AOL?). While web fortunes were made in those early days, the fastest part of the web growth curve starting after the walls came down. The same could well happen here.
Learn more about Cloudian HyperStore Multi-Cloud at https://cloudian.com.
RHEL 8 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8) was released in Beta on November 14, 2018, with new features and improvements as compared to the antecedent – RHEL 7.
Newly introduced cool features of RHEL 8
Going Atomic with your Container Infrastructure
Improved System Performance
Red hat includes many container tools in RHEL8. It brings support for Buildah, Podman, and Skopeo.
System management boost up with the composer features. This feature facilitates organizations to build and deploy customRHEL images.
RHEL 8 brings support for the Stratis filesystem, file system snapshots, and LUKSv2 disk encryption with Network-BoundDisk Encryption (NBDE).
The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux Web Console also enhances the management of RHEL. It enables administrators to deal with bare metal, virtual, local and remote Linux servers.
Security
The new security is also a key element of RHEL 8. The addition of support for the Open SSL 1.1.1 and TLS 1.3 cryptographic standard makes RHEL 8 remarkable.
By integrating the new features, Red Hat makes it easier for the system administrator to manage. The administrator can switch between modes (default, legacy, future, and fips) by using the new update -crypto-policies command.
System-wide cryptographic policies are functional by default.
Application Streams
With the idea of Application stream, RHEL8 is following the Fedora Modularity lead.
With the release of Fedora 28, earlier this year, Led Fedora Linux distribution (Red Hat’s community) introduced the concept of modularity.
Without waiting for the next version of the operating system, User space components will update in less time than core operating system packages.
Installations of many versions of the same packages (such as an interpreted language or a database) are also available by the use of an application stream.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 - Develop and Deploy faster | DevNation Live
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 - Develop and Deploy faster | DevNation Live
Memory
The biggest single change in RHEL 8 system performance is the new upper limit on physical memory capacity.
RHEL 8 has an upper limit of 4PB of physicalmemory capacity. It is much higher than the RHEL 7, which is having a physicalupper limit of 64TB of system memory per server.
Focused Features of RHEL 8
- For desktop users, Wayland is the default display server as a replacement of the X.org server. Yet X.Org is still available.
- RHEL 8 supports PHP 7.2
- In RHEL8, Nginx 1.14 is available in the core repository
- Shared copy-on-write data extents are supported by XFS.
- Iptables are replaced by the nftables as a default network filtering framework.
- The new version of YUM4 comes with RHEL 8 which is based on DNF.
- It is compatible with the YUM v3 (which is present in RHEL 7).
- It provides fast performances and less installed dependencies.
- To meet specific workload requirements, it provides more choices of package version.
- RPM v4.14 is available in RHEL 8. Before starting the installation; RPM validates the whole package contents.
Along With the addition of new technologies, this new release removes some of the older technologies.
- Python is not installed by default. The default implementation is Python 3.6.
- Limited support for python 2.6.
- KDE support has been deprecated.
- The Up-gradation from KDE on RHEL 7 to GNOME on RHEL 8 is unsupported.
- Removal of Btrfs support.
Major difference between RHEL 7 and RHEL 8
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 architecture
To simplify your development experience, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 has three pre-enabled repositories:
- BaseOS —“mostly” has operating system content
- Application Streams (AppStream) — most developer tools will be here
- CodeReady Builder — additional libraries and developer tools
- Content in BaseOS is intended to provide the core set of the underlying operating system functionality that provides the foundation for all installations. This content is available in the traditional RPM format. For a list of BaseOS packages, see RHEL 8 Package Manifest.
Application Streams, essentially the next generation of Software Collections, are intended to provide additional functionality beyond what is available in BaseOS. This content set includes additional user space applications, runtime languages, databases, web servers, etc. that support a variety of workloads and use cases. The net for you is to simply use the component and version that you want. Once there’s market demand, newer stable versions of components will be added.
Linux containers
Linux containers are a critical component of cloud-native development and microservices, so Red Hat’s lightweight, open standards-based container toolkit is now fully supported and included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Built with enterprise IT security needs in mind, Buildah (building containers), Podman (running containers), and Skopeo (sharing/finding containers) help developers find, run, build and share containerized applications more quickly and efficiently—thanks to the distributed and, importantly, daemonless nature of the tools.
Introducing Universal Base Image
Derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) provides a freely redistributable, enterprise-grade base container image on which developers can build and deliver their applications. This means you can containerize your app in UBI, and deploy it anywhere. Of course, it will be more secure and Red Hat supported when deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but now you have options. There are separate UBI 7 and UBI 8 versions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and 8, respectively. Read more about them in the Red Hat Universal Base Image introduction.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 developer resources
Over the past few months, we have produced a number of how-to documents specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Here’s a list in case you missed them:
- Intro to Application Streams—a primer about how Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 has been re-architected with developers in mind
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Cheat Sheet—your quick reference to new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 commands, and a list of the more common developer tools
- Introduction to Builder Repo—read what it is and why you’ll find it handy
- Installing Java 8 and 11—no more to say
- Set up your LAMP stack—with Apache, MySQL, and PHP
- Building containers without daemons—intro to using Podman, Buildah, and more.
- XDP part 1 & part 2
- Network debugging with eBPF
- Quick install on VirtualBox
- Quick install on bare metal
- Python in RHEL 8
- Quick install: Node.js
- What, no python in RHEL 8?
- Quick install: Python
- Image Builder: Building custom system images
- Introduction to Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI)
What's New in Red Hat Satellite
Red Hat Developer Subscriptions
Red Hat Developer members have been enjoying no-cost developer subscriptions for 3+ years now, and RHEL 8 is now automatically part of that. If your company wants developer support, there are several Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Subscriptions options with Red Hat support, too.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was unveiled, the latest and greatest edition of Red Hat's signature operating system. Red Hat is billing it as being "redesigned for the hybrid cloud era and built to support the workloads and operations that stretch from enterprise datacenters to multiple public clouds."
That's not surprising coming from a company that's been billing itself as a cloud company instead of as a Linux company, which is how it got its start, for a number of years. It was already a long-time proponent of hybrid cloud five years ago when RHEL 7, the previous major release, was first ready for download, and that was a time when the cloud was just getting into high gear, containers were just starting to show their promise, and "DevOps,""agile," and "microservices" had not yet become the buzzwords of the decade.
These days, the company earns much of its money building tailored hybrid cloud systems for enterprises, so designing RHEL 8 to help users take advantage of cloud native technologies and DevOps workflows was a no-brainer, as it plays into Red Hat's hand. It's also central to IBM, which shelled out $34 billion to buy Red Hat, hoping to buoy its own aspirations for dominance in the hybrid cloud arena.
"Clouds are built on Linux operating systems, by and large, and containers not only require a Linux operating system underneath them, but also most containers actually have a Linux distribution in them," Gunnar Hellekson, Red Hat's senior director of product management, told Data Center Knowledge at Red Hat Summit. "The choices that we make in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 are focused not just on the existing Red Hat Linux traditional use cases, but also focusing on these new cloud and container use cases as well."
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Keeping "traditional use case" customers happy, those running Linux on-premises or in colocation facilities to support monolithic legacy applications, is also near the top of Red Hat's agenda, since plain vanilla support contracts remain the single largest source of income for the company. The company was quick to reassure traditional enterprise users attending the summit that RHEL 8 remains the rock steady operating system it's always been, and pointed out that it ships with "tens of thousands" of hardware configurations and thousands of ISP applications, both of which are especially important to traditional on-prem users.
But what Red Hat was selling was the new operating system's cloud native prowess, along with its added support for the DevOps workflow.
Helping DevOps
While the emphasis was on RHEL's new cloud and container capabilities, the most useful new features might be the improvements made in the way the OS interoperates with the DevOps model, which seeks to combine development and operations into a single unit. Red Hat's focus is to ease the burden on the ops side, freeing up teams to devote more time and energy to the dev side of the equation, while also addressing the changing face of data center workforces.
"In this latest release we've included a tool called the Web Console, which is a graphical interface to point and click your way through some basic systems management tasks," Hellekson said, "hopefully lowering the barrier of entry for people who are new to Linux."
Features such as Web Console, along with System Roles which supply consistent interfaces to automate routine systems administration tasks, are important to the DevOps model, where team members with little traditional admin experience often need to handle Linux administrative tasks.
Ansible-based System Roles were introduced in the last RHEL release, but have been expanded in RHEL 8, with particular emphasis placed on making sure automated system tasks will survive an upgrade to the next latest-and-greatest RHEL when it comes along.
"In the past, the problem has been when you move to a new version of the operating system you have to redo all your automation, because of new interfaces, things being named differently, and so on,"
Hellekson explained.
"But with System Roles we're creating stability across the major releases so you don't have to retool when you do a new update."
This should be especially useful to DevOps teams going forward, since Red Hat plans for major versions of RHEL to be released more often, perhaps as often as every three years.
Another added feature to aid DevOps teams is Application Streams, which keeps databases, interpreters, and other third-party software bundled and supported in RHEL updated to the latest version, with control given to deny the update and stick with the version being used, or even to roll back to previous versions.
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RHEL and the Hybrid Cloud
For cloud and containers, RHEL 8 includes features that normally would have to be installed and managed separately.
"Baked into the operating system we have what we're calling the Container Toolkit, which includes tools like Podman, Buildah, and Skopeo,"
Hellekson said.
"We make these available in the operating system because we know customers rely on us to provide them that kind of basic fundamental tooling in order to build things like OpenShift, or even OpenStack."
Also important for hybrid cloud deployments, RHEL 8 makes it easy to build gold, also called "master," images for everything from bare metal to virtual machines to public clouds. This is important because even relatively small deployments will now usually need to scale across diverse platforms, at least from on-premises to cloud.
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"If you're building a gold image, you have to build it one way for a physical server, then you have to build a virtual machine in a different way, and you're going to do it differently for the cloud provider," he said. "We have a tool upstream we call the Composer and a product we call the Image Builder, and this allows the customer to create a blueprint for their gold RHEL image."
The Image Builder can be accessed either through the command line or a GUI. When accessing through the interface, he said that with one button "a customer can make an ISO for physical servers, it'll make a virtual machine image for VMs, it will make an Amazon and Azure image, and so forth."
Hellekson also stressed the amount of effort that Red Hat has exerted to make sure the user experience is consistent across platforms, with no architecture-specific surprises.
"The hardware world has gotten a lot more fragmented than it was in the past," he said. "You have new architectures, like Power and Arm, that are beginning to ascend. You have the public cloud providers trying to compete against both each other and against the on-premise hardware providers, so they're trying to distinguish themselves with things like GPU acceleration, FPGAs, and things like that. The trick to being an operating system in an environment like that is you have to take all comers. You have to enable all of these different variants of the platforms and still provide that consistent experience."
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