Linux and redhat enterprise

Why choose Red Hat for Linux?

Every technology in your IT stack needs to work together. And the workloads need to be portable and scalable across bare metal servers, virtual machines, containers, and private and public clouds. They need a modern, security-oriented operating system (OS). That OS is Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®.

With a standard OS underlying your workloads, you can easily move them across environments—where it makes sense for your business. Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives you a consistent, stable, and high-performance platform across hybrid cloud deployments, along with built-in manageability and integration with the broader Red Hat management and automation portfolio.

Red Hat is a trusted partner to more than 90% of the companies in the Fortune 500, and a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription provides you direct access to, and advocacy within, the open source community. It also integrates with an ecosystem of thousands of certified cloud, software, and hardware providers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is your foundation for innovation, offering the latest stable development tools, container technologies, hardware, and cloud advancements.

Certified in the cloud

Every cloud environment is unique. That means you need a flexible—but stable—OS. Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers the flexibility of open source code and the innovation of open source communities, along with certifications from hundreds of public cloud and service providers. We even designed a container platform, Red Hat OpenShift, so you can build, deploy, and scale cloud-native applications in public clouds—allowing you to confidently implement the cloud strategy that works for you.

With an eye to giving customers even more flexibility to use the infrastructure they have along with any new or future components, Red Hat works with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and others, giving users the option to standardize their cloud operations with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a configuration that best works for them.

Security and compliance

A more secure datacenter begins with the OS. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has built-in security features such as Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and mandatory access controls (MAC) to help you combat intrusions and meet regulatory compliance. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also Common Criteria and FIPS 140-2 certified, as well as being the first Linux container framework support to be Common Criteria-certified (v7.1).

Using a supported, enterprise open source OS, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, means that thousands of developers are monitoring millions of lines of code in the Linux kernel—finding flaws and developing fixes before vulnerabilities become problems. And with Linux kernel live patching, security patches can be applied without downtime. Red Hat has dedicated teams of experts verifying those bug fixes and deploying patches without interrupting your applications, like those that helped handle Meltdown and Spectre a few years ago.

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As an industry recognized platform, and the fact that Red Hat goes to great lengths to get their stuff security accredited, it makes it a lot easier for me to get applications put into production since I can point my customer security people at the work that Red Hat has done upstream.

Thomas H Jones II

Senior Cloud Engineer at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

Support for emerging open source technologies

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides more than an OS—it also connects you to Red Hat’s extensive hardware, software, and cloud partner ecosystem, and comes with 24×7 support.

Each version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed for any enterprise and sets the stage for what you can do tomorrow. From containers to automation and even artificial intelligence, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is created for innovators, made for developers, and engineered for operations.

Our latest Linux release—Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9—helps achieve long-term IT success by using a common, flexible foundation to support innovation and accelerate time to market.

Streamlined migration process

Our collaboration with other major cloud providers means Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a great platform for services like Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), giving your enterprise the flexibility to utilize legacy systems while incorporating new technologies. The thought of the migration processes involved can seem daunting, but we work with you to make the process as easy as possible.

From your first steps installing, migrating, or upgrading Red Hat Enterprise Linux to eventually deploying across multiple clouds, we provide utilities to help.

Our migration tools make it easy to get started if you’re coming from CentOS Linux or another Linux distribution, like Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora. For example, you can convert from CentOS Linux® or Oracle Linux distro to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 with the Convert2RHEL command line utility. Convert2RHEL will automatically identify and replace OS packages from your original Linux distribution with Red Hat Enterprise Linux equivalents, but Convert2RHEL is officially supported to help troubleshoot conversion variants.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 for Third Party Linux Migration is a new offering designed to assist users of CentOS Linux 7 to maintain business continuity after the EOL date. This competitively-priced offering includes a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription and tooling to convert in-place instances of CentOS Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Simplify and streamline the process of assembling customized RHEL operating system images with the latest content and security updates for a hybrid cloud environment. You can create optimized operating system images with Red Hat Enterprise Linux image builder that can handle the details of cloud deployments when you’re ready.

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Understanding Linux

As IT systems and workloads get more complex, the underlying architecture and operating system must be reliable, scalable, and performance driven. Linux is the stable foundation for all IT workloads and deployments—whether traditional or innovative—from bare metal to virtual, cloud, and containers.

What is Linux?

Linux® is an open source operating system (OS). It was originally conceived of and created as a hobby by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Linus, while at university, sought to create an alternative, free, open source version of the MINIX operating system, which was itself based on the principles and design of Unix. That hobby has since become the OS with the largest user base, the most-used OS on publicly available internet servers, and the only OS used on the top 500 fastest supercomputers.

Tux, the Linux mascot, by Larry Ewing

Perhaps the best thing about Linux is that it’s open source. Linux is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). That means that anyone can run, study, share, and modify the software. The modified code can also be redistributed, and even sold, but must be done so under the same license. This differs greatly from traditional operating systems—Unix and Windows, for example—which are proprietary, locked-down, and delivered as-is and unmodifiable.

Note: What is and is not included when referring to Linux is constantly debated. For the purpose of this definition, we’re talking about the Linux kernel in conjunction with tools, applications, and services bundled along with it. All of these things together make the functional operating system that most people call Linux. The Free Software Foundation refers to this combination as «GNU/Linux» because some of these tools, applications, and services are components of the GNU system. They were bundled with the Linux kernel, so the Linux we know is more than the Linux kernel itself.

What can you do with Linux?

Linux can serve as the basis for nearly any type of IT initiative, including containers, cloud-native applications, and security. It’s at the core of some of the biggest industries and businesses in the world—from knowledge-sharing websites like Wikipedia to the New York Stock Exchange to mobile devices running Android (which is a specific-use distribution of the Linux kernel with complimentary software). Linux has grown over the years to be the de facto standard for running highly available, reliable, and critical workloads in datacenters and cloud deployments. It has multiple use cases, distributions, target systems and devices, and capabilities—all depending on your needs and workloads.

Microsoft has embraced Linux and open source in other ways, producing a SQL Server for Linux and open sourcing their .NET framework (.NET Core/Mono) so that any platform can run it, opening up the capability for Linux-using developers to make applications with that framework. By 2027, all SAP customers will be moving to SAP HANA—an in-memory, relational database management system—which only runs on Linux. As of 2017, 50% of the SAP market are Windows customers.

When it comes to cloud, even on Microsoft’s Azure, more than 60% of the images on the Azure Marketplace and nearly ⅓ of virtual machines are Linux-based. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform offer up multiple distributions of Linux in their publicly available images.

Linux continues to be the operating system of the future, with more and more systems depending on its stability and extensibility.

How easy is it to use Linux?

Very easy. Almost every Linux distribution comes with a graphic-user interface (GUI) that makes point-and-click actions very easy. These GUIs revolutionized computing during the OS wars in the late 1970s by humanizing software—making it more visual. More real.

But at some point, you might need to ask the computer to do something outside the prepackaged bucket of actions a GUI can perform. At that point, you need to open up the command line—the strips of code you see tech-savvy geniuses in TV and movies feverishly typing away at. But that Hollywood treatment makes the command line (a staple of open source OSs) seem like something impossible to master.

The truth is, the command line is the most straightforward use of a computer. But there are some Linux distros—like our latest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux—that make using open source OSs even easier.

Is Red Hat the same thing as Linux?

Red Hat initially saw success supporting a custom distribution of Linux, then named «Red Hat® Linux.» The growth and reliability of Red Hat Linux made the two synonymous in many people’s minds. Since those early days, Red Hat’s solutions and technologies have built on this success to include nearly all aspects of the IT stack.

Red Hat curates, secures, and supports a Linux distribution—now known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a change that took place in 2003 as a result of merging with the Fedora Linux Project. Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports and powers software and technologies for automation, cloud, containers, middleware, storage, application development, microservices, virtualization, management, and more.

Linux plays a major role as the core of many of Red Hat’s offerings. It’s far beyond simply being an operating systems for servers—Linux is the foundation for the modern IT stack.

Can you trust Linux? Is it secure?

Security isn’t something that you can simply deploy and forget. Security must be an integrated part of any business—and any deployment strategy.

The best security is layered.

Security isn’t a feature. Security is holistic. When it comes to IT security, the operating system plays a part in a larger story that goes from physical hardware to the people with access to that hardware as well as the applications deployed on the hardware. The broader view of security also takes into account risk management, compliance, and governance. Securing one aspect doesn’t mean everything is secure—you have to address all parts.

Because Linux is modular its security can be more easily managed. Each piece that makes up the Linux operating system has the ability to be audited, monitored, and secured. Linux has built-in tools and modules—like SELinux—to help further lock down, monitor, report, and remedy security issues. There’s also a concerted effort within Linux to separate the user space from the kernel space, meaning that the processes running throughout the system aren’t all necessarily available to users (depending on role privileges) and, likewise, the user processes aren’t available to the system as a whole. This is the key concept and enabler for technologies like containers and virtualization—which require distinct, separated, and secure workloads and permissions.

Of course there’s no such thing as a perfectly secure operating system, but there are steps you can take—and advantages that Linux offers—to get closer to being secure.

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