On Tuesday, Red Hat announced the general availability of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 7.6. RHEL 7.6 is a consistent hybrid cloud foundation for enterprise IT. It is built on an open source innovation, designed to enable organizations to match the pace with emerging cloud-native technologies. It also supports IT operations across enterprise IT’s four footprints. Just three months back the beta version of RHEL 7.6 was released.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 addresses a range of IT challenges, emphasizes security and compliance, management and automation, and Linux container innovations.
Features in RHEL 7.6
RHEL 7.6 solves security concerns
IT security has always been a key challenge for many IT departments as it does not get easier in complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 is the answer to this problem as it introduces a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware modules as part of Network Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE).
NBDE provides security across networked environments whereas, TPM works on-premise to add an additional layer of security, tying disks to specific physical systems.
These two layers of security for hybrid cloud operations help keep information on disks physically more secure.
RHEL 7.6 also makes it easier to manage firewalls with improvements to nftables, a packet filtering framework. It also simplifies the configuration of counter-intrusion measures. Updated cryptographic algorithms delivered for RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) are enabled by default with RHEL 7.6. This helps the organizations handling sensitive information to match their pace with Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliance and standards bodies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Management and automation get better
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 helps in making Linux adoption easier for the users as it brings enhancements to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Web Console, which provides a graphical overview of Red Hat system health and status.
RHEL 7.6 has made it easier to find updates on the system summary page. It also provides automated configuration of single sign-on for identity management and a firewall control interface. This makes it easier for security administrators.
RHEL 7.6 comes with the Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), which provides a safer and efficient mechanism for monitoring activities within the kernel. Soon, it will help in enabling additional performance monitoring and network tracing tools.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 also provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles which is a collection of Ansible modules. These modules are designed to provide a consistent way to automate and remotely manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments. Each of these modules provides a ready-made automated workflow for handling common and complex tasks, involved in Linux environments. This automation helps to remove the possibilities of human error from these tasks. This, in turn, frees up the IT teams and lets them focus more on adding business value.
Red Hat’s lightweight container toolkit
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 supports the rise of cloud-native technologies by introducing Red Hat’s lightweight container toolkit. This toolkit comprises of CRI-O, Buildah, Skopeo, and now Podman. Each of these tools is built on a fully open source and community-backed technologies. They are based on open standards like the Open Container Initiative (OCI) format.
Podman complements Buildah and Skopeo while sharing the same foundations as CRI-O. It enables users to run containers and groups of containers (pods) from a familiar command-line interface, which eliminates the need of a daemon.
This, in turn, helps to reduce the complexity in container creation while making it easier for developers to build containers on workstations, in continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) systems and within high-performance computing (HPC) or big data scheduling systems.
For more information on this release, check out Red Hat’s official website
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