Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 Beta released with focus on security, cloud, and automation

Red Hat has rolled out their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 beta in their goal of becoming the cloud powerhouse. This release focuses on security and compliance, automation, and cloud deployment features.

Linux security improvements

As far as Linux based security is considered, some improvements made include:

• GnuTLS library with Hardware Security Module (HSM) support
• Strengthened OpenSSL for mainframes
• Enhancements to the nftables firewall
• Integration of Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) to provide a safer mechanism for monitoring Linux kernel activity

Hybrid cloud deployment-related changes

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 has introduced a variety of cloud deployment improvements. Red Hat’s Paul Cormier considers the hybrid cloud to be the default technology choice. “Enterprises want the best answers to meet their specific needs, regardless of whether that’s through the public cloud or on bare metal in their own datacenter.”

For starters, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 uses Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware modules to enable Network Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE). This provides two layers of security features for hybrid cloud operations:

• The network-based mechanism works in the cloud,
• On-premises TPM helps to keep information on disks more secure.

They have also introduced Podman, a part of Red Hat’s lightweight container toolkit. It adds enterprise-grade security features to containers. Podman complements Buildah and Skopeo by enabling users to run, build, and share containers using the command line interface. It can also work with CRI-O, a lightweight Kubernetes containers runtime.

Management and Automation

The latest beta version also adds enhancements to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Web Console including:

• Showing available updates on the system summary pages.
• Automatic configuration of single sign-on for identity management, helping to simplify this task for security administrators.
• An interface to control firewall services.

These are just a select few updates. For a more detailed coverage, go through the release notes available on the Red Hat Blog.

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