Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 adds evolved container tools to help fuel cloud-native development

Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, the foundation for Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, built for the interconnected nature of the hybrid cloud era, is designed to offer these capabilities and more, extending beyond the reliability, stability and production-readiness for which the platform is known. The latest additions to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 platform help organizations recognize more value from existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions with:

• New intelligent management and monitoring capabilities via updates to Red Hat Insights
• Enhanced container tools
• A smoother user experience for Linux experts and newcomers alike

Smart monitoring

As the world works to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more IT organizations are operating remotely or with limited manpower. Now more than ever, IT teams need to be able to monitor, manage and analyze the underlying foundations of enterprise technology stacks, regardless of size, scale, complexity or where they reside across hybrid/multicloud footprints. Red Hat Enterprise Linux can help intelligently detect, diagnose and address potential issues before they impact production, driven by advancements in Red Hat Insights.

Red Hat Insights, Red Hat’s proactive operations and security risk management offering, is included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions for versions 6.4 and higher. The latest updates to the service add new use case functionality and features including:

Improved visibility into IT security, compliance postures and operational efficiencies helping to eliminate manual methods and improve productivity in managing large and complex environments while enhancing security and compliance across these deployments.

New Policies and Patch services to help organizations define and monitor important internal policies and determine which Red Hat product advisories apply to Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances as well as guidance for remediation.

Drift service to help IT teams compare systems to baselines, providing a benchmark to guide strategies for reducing complexity and expediting troubleshooting.

Additional monitoring and performance updates in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 include:

• Improved resource management with Control Groups (cgroup) v2, which is designed to help limit memory usage through reserving memory and setting usage floors/limits. This helps prevent specific processes from overconsuming memory and causing system failures or slowdowns.
• Better capabilities for optimizing performance-sensitive workloads through NUMA and sub-NUMA service policies.
• Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) 5.0.2 which adds new collection agents for Microsoft SQL Server 2019 to help collect and analyze a wide array of SQL Server-related metrics, providing a clearer picture for database and operating system tuning.
• Red Hat subscription watch, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool that enables customers to more easily view and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform subscriptions across hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Evolved container tools to build for the future

While containerized workloads provide a clear path towards digital transformation and a cloud-native future, the tools used to build these applications must balance the latest, up-to-date innovations with a stable and supported lifecycle. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, an updated application stream of Red Hat’s container tools is available, supported for 24 months. Additionally, for organizations looking to build containers inside of containers for additional layers of isolation and security, containerized versions of Skopeo and Buildah are available in Tech Preview.

To further extend the security of containerized workloads, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 introduces Udica, a new tool for more easily creating customized, container-centric SELinux security policies. When applied to a specific workload, Udica can reduce the risk that a process can “break out” of a container and cause problems across other containers or to the host itself.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 also introduces enhancements to the Red Hat Universal Base Image, including:

• OpenJDK and .NET 3.0 for expanded developer choice in building Red Hat certification-ready cloud-native applications
• Improved access to source code associated with a given image through a single command, making it easier for Red Hat partners to meet source code requirements for open source licensing needs.