Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.5, which has a strong focus on hybrid cloud. As the market is evolving, so is Red Hat. In 2014, Red Hat signaled a shift in focus from data centers to mobile and cloud. Red Hat acquired companies like FeedHenry and Core OS to strengthen its mobile and cloud portfolio.

Now the cash cow of Red Hat, RHEL, is reflecting their changing focus. RHEL 7.5 offers enhanced security and compliance controls, in addition to better integration with Microsoft Windows infrastructure both on-premise and in Microsoft Azure.

Companies are mixing environments – spanning across on-prem, public cloud, and private cloud. RHEL 7.5 tries to reduce the complexity, especially in terms of security, that comes with such a hybrid environment. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 has enhanced software security controls to mitigate risk.

Red Hat said that a major component of these controls is security automation through the integration of OpenSCAP with Red Hat Ansible Automation. This is designed to enable the creation of Ansible Playbooks directly from OpenSCAP scans, which can then be used to implement remediations more rapidly and consistently across a hybrid IT environment. Sensitive data can also now be better secured across varied environments with enhancements to Network-Bound Disk Encryption that support automatic decryption of data volumes.

RHEL 7.5 also comes with production ready container solutions. RHEL 7.5 includes support for Buildah, an open source utility designed to help developers create and modify Linux container images without a full container runtime or daemon running in the background.

RHEL 7.5 is available for multiple architectures including x86, IBM Power, IBM z Systems, and 64-bit ARM. Although RHEL is available for subscription, you can download the  30-day evaluation version for free.

Sources: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-strengthens-hybrid-clouds-backbone-latest-version-red-hat-enterprise-linux

https://access.redhat.com/products/red-hat-enterprise-linux/evaluation