Red Hat, Inc. announced the general availability of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4,
the latest version of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 brings a wide range of new and enhanced
capabilities to better manage the complexity of hybrid cloud computing
in an increasingly AI-centric world, including refined management and
automation and proactive support in building standard operating
environments (SOEs) for distributed systems.
According to a recent survey
by Red Hat partner Dynatrace, 88% of organizations responded that their
technology stack has increased in complexity over the past 12 months,
with more than half saying that this complexity will only continue to
increase in the future. For Red Hat, this means making Linux platforms
more accessible, more manageable and more user-friendly is crucial to
help limit how the operating system contributes to this spike in
complexity.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, and the
forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10, show Red Hat's continued
commitment to lowering the barriers of entry to Linux in general, as
well as making it more manageable and scalable to address evolving
demands.
Bringing proactive guidance to Red Hat Insights
Standardizing
foundational IT technologies can effectively be a force multiplier, as
teams can use the same skills, workflows, tools and commands across a
wide range of disparate environments. But building, let alone
maintaining, an SOE is no small feat - this is where updates to Red Hat
Insights image builder can help.
Available soon,
Insights will be able to proactively provide recommendations and
information in creating SOE images based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It
will also be able to analyze selected packages and recommend related,
relevant packages to also be included, and can help find packages that
are not available in the currently selected repositories. Insights image
builder also now highlights relevant life cycle information for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux versions, helping systems administrators and
operations teams be aware of upcoming life cycle milestones and prepare
for possible upgrades.
Additionally, the Red Hat Hybrid
Cloud Console virtual assistant can help guide users in creating Red Hat
Enterprise Linux images, enabling custom content and even launching Red
Hat Enterprise Linux images on supported cloud providers.
Lowering Linux barriers through automation
Automation
is increasingly a critical part of an operation team's toolbox, and Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 continues Red Hat's drive to make automation
an integral part of modern Linux platforms. 9.4 further extends Red Hat
Enterprise Linux system roles, deployment-ready Ansible content
collections that help configure and launch common administrative tasks.
New system roles-related capabilities include:
- System
roles at the edge through rpm-ostree, which enable users to automate
operating system-level tasks at the edge, such as Podman for deploying
product-ready container workloads.
- A
fapolicyd system role to automate allowing or denying application
executions at scale, removing the potential for human error in possible
breach escalations.
- A snapshot system
role for administrators to create and manage point-in-time snapshots of
logical volume manager (LVM) storage volumes, which helps speed up
backup and recovery solutions in a more repeatable and predictable
manner at scale.
- A bootloader system
role to help configure the kernel command line itself, which helps
improve the consistency and management of Linux systems at scale.
Expanding the hardware ecosystem
Choice
is a fundamental component of the hybrid cloud, starting at the
hardware architecture level. Red Hat remains committed to offering a
wide range of hardware ecosystem options, and with the general
availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, the platform now offers
full support for the Arm® architecture. Previously in Technology
Preview, support is now provided for Arm 64-based server platform hosts
running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 Arm 64 guests with 64k page sizes.
Availability
Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 is now available for existing Red Hat
customers via the Red Hat Customer Portal. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10
will be available in the coming weeks via the Customer Portal as well.