8.5 version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux caters to multi-cloud, predictive analytics, containerisation

Red Hat has rolled out version 8.5 of its main-line branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which upgrades its support for containerisation, predictive analytics, and multi-cloud.

Red Hat Insight, the company’s predictive-analytics service -- available through most RHEL subscriptions -- now has more robust abilities in the areas of vulnerability identification, compliance, and remediation, the company said.

Containerisation is upgraded with RHEL 8.5 to make containerised applications easier to deploy and manage, according to Red Hat. The vendor also introduced the ability to create containerised images faster through rootless use of the OverlayFS filesystem. OverlayFS is “union file system,” which allows users to overlay one file system over another, enabling multiple users or applications to access it at the same time.

Containerised Podman deployments are now available for continuous integration/deployment systems, which means that the Docker-like command-line interface for containers is more readily available to let containerised apps run without their own daemon.

RHEL 8.5 also supports native integration of cgroup2, which should mean better and more logical organisation for the computing resources required by individual containers. It also supports container image-signature verification implemented by default, for improved security.

Multi-cloud support got a facelift in RHEL 8.5 through the addition of new “system roles.” These are pre-built system configurations for RHEL deployments, designed to make it easier to support specific workloads without having to hand-create specific configurations each time. 

The new system roles include a database-focused role for Microsoft SQL Server, a VPN tunnel for reduced risk of misconfiguration in those environments, and a standardised Postfix role for easy deployment of mail servers.

OpenJDK 17 and .NET Core 6 support have also been added, which should prove helpful for application developers, the company said. It also said that RHEL’s web-console core functionality has been upgraded for easier performance management and live kernel patching.

The new version of RHEL is available now via the company’s customer portal.