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.
What is Linux?
Linux® is an open source operating system (OS). An operating system is the software that directly manages a system’s hardware and resources, like CPU, memory, and storage. The OS sits between applications and hardware and makes the connections between all of your software and the physical resources that do the work.
What’s a command line?
The command line is your direct access to a computer. It’s where you ask software to perform hardware actions that point-and-click graphical user interfaces (GUIs) simply can’t ask.
Command lines are available on many operating systems—proprietary or open source. But it’s usually associated with Linux, because both command lines and open source software, together, give users unrestricted access to their computer.
Our latest release of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux comes with even more built-in command line capabilities than ever before and includes consoles that bundle those capabilities in easy-to-use modules that exist off of the command line.
How does Linux work?
Think about an OS like a car engine. An engine can run on its own, but it becomes a functional car when it’s connected with a transmission, axles, and wheels. Without the engine running properly, the rest of the car won’t work.
Linux was designed to be similar to UNIX, but has evolved to run on a wide variety of hardware from phones to supercomputers. Every Linux-based OS involves the Linux kernel—which manages hardware resources—and a set of software packages that make up the rest of the operating system. Organizations can also choose to run their Linux OS on a Linux server.
The OS includes some common core components, like the GNU tools, among others. These tools give the user a way to manage the resources provided by the kernel, install additional software, configure performance and security settings, and more. All of these tools bundled together make up the functional operating system. Because Linux is an open source OS, combinations of software can vary between Linux distributions.
How well do you know Linux?
Test your knowledge and earn badges in Legends of Linux trivia.