Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, the operating system designed to span the breadth of deployments across enterprise IT. For any workload running on any environment, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 delivers one enterprise Linux experience to meet the unique technology needs of evolving enterprises. From deploying new Linux workloads into production to launching digital transformation strategies, the next-generation enterprise is built on top of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform .

Spanning the entirety of the hybrid cloud, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform provides a catalyst for IT organizations to do more than simply meet today’s challenges; it gives them the foundation and tools to launch their own future, wherever they want it to be. Stefanie Chiras vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is the operating system redesigned for the hybrid cloud era and built to support the workloads and operations that stretch from enterprise datacenters to multiple public clouds. Red Hat understands that the operating system should do more than simply exist as part of a technology stack; it should be the catalyst for innovation. From Linux containers and hybrid cloud to DevOps and artificial intelligence (AI), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is built to not just support enterprise IT in the hybrid cloud, but to help these new technology strategies thrive.

As the importance of hybrid cloud and multicloud deployments grow, the operating system must evolve as well. According to IDC1 , 70 percent of customers already deploy multicloud environments and 64 percent of applications in a typical IT portfolio today are based in a cloud environment, whether public or private. Red Hat views the operating system as the keystone to this IT innovation and more, especially as Red Hat Enterprise Linux is poised to impact more than $10 trillion in global business revenues in 2019, according to a Red Hat-sponsored IDC report.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8: Intelligent Linux for the hybrid cloud

For more than 15 years, Red Hat has helped enterprises innovate on Linux, first in their datacenters and now across the hybrid cloud. As datacenters grow in scale and scope and workload complexity builds, the skills required to deploy and maintain Linux-based production systems become increasingly critical. With the announcement of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, this intelligence and expertise is now built-in to Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions by default with Red Hat Insights, delivering Red Hat’s Linux expertise as-a-service.

Red Hat Insights helps proactively identify and remediate IT issues, from security vulnerabilities to stability problems. It uses predictive analytics based on Red Hat’s vast knowledge of open technologies to help administrators avoid problems and unplanned downtime in production environments.

Managing systems dispersed across a variety of on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure can present a significant challenge to IT organizations. Red Hat Smart Management, a layered add-on for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, helps IT teams gain the benefits of hybrid cloud computing while minimizing its inherent management complexities. Combining Red Hat Satellite for on-premise systems management and cloud management services for distributed Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments, Red Hat Smart Management provides rich capabilities to manage, patch, configure and provision Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments across the hybrid cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8: Blazing a faster path to modern applications

To meet evolving business demands, IT organizations are looking to new workloads, from artificial intelligence (AI) to the Internet-of-Things (IoT), to drive competitive advantages in crowded marketplaces. Linux provides the innovative muscle to power these differentiated services, but only Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 delivers this innovation along with a hardened code base, extensive security updates, award-winning support and a vast ecosystem of tested and validated supporting technologies.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has always been known as the most stable and secure foundation for applications. However, in the past it was hard to get the most up-to-date languages and frameworks that developers wanted without compromising that stability. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 introduces Application Streams - fast-moving languages, frameworks and developer tools are updated frequently in this stream without impacting the core resources that have made Red Hat Enterprise Linux an enterprise benchmark. This melds faster developer innovation with production stability in a single, enterprise-class operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8: Introducing a world of opportunity for everyone

Linux continues to be the number one operating system for developers building the next generation of enterprise applications. As these applications move into production, stability, enhanced security and testing/certification on existing hardware and environments become paramount needs. This shifts the onus from developers to operations teams and, paired with the trend of Linux being looked to as a primary platform for production applications, makes Linux administration and management skills critical for modern datacenters. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is designed to lower the barrier to entry for Linux, enabling greater accessibility for Windows administrators, Linux beginners and new systems administrators without fear of the command line.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 abstracts away many of the deep complexities of granular sysadmin tasks behind the Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console. The console provides an intuitive, consistent graphical interface for managing and monitoring Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, from the health of virtual machines to overall system performance. To further improve ease of use, Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports in-place upgrades, providing a more streamlined, efficient and timely path for users to convert Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 instances to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 also includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles, which automate many of the more complex tasks around managing and configuring Linux in production. Powered by Red Hat Ansible Automation, System Roles are pre-configured Ansible modules that enable ready-made automated workflows for handling common, complex sysadmin tasks. This automation makes it easier for new systems administrators to adopt Linux protocols and helps to eliminate human error as the cause of common configuration issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Enabling the world of possibilities without sacrificing security

IT innovation is rooted in open source, with Linux often serving as the catalyst for major advancements in enterprise technology, from Linux containers and Kubernetes to serverless and AI. Backed by a more secure, hardened open source supply chain, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 helps pave the way for IT organizations to adopt production-ready innovation by deploying only the necessary packages for specific workloads. This enhances the adoption of emerging technologies while helping to minimize potential risk.

To enhance security, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 supports the OpenSSL 1.1.1 and TLS 1.3 cryptographic standards. This provides access to the strongest, latest standards in cryptographic protection that can be implemented system-wide via a single command, limiting the need for application-specific policies and tuning.

With cloud-native applications and services frequently driving digital transformation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 delivers full support for the Red Hat container toolkit. Based on open standards, the toolkit provides technologies for creating, running and sharing containerized applications. It helps to streamline container development and eliminates the need for bulky, less secure container daemons.

Every datacenter. Every cloud. Every application.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 drives a thriving partner ecosystem, as is expected of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, encompassing thousands of certified applications, Linux container images, hardware configurations and cloud providers. Building on the deep partnerships forged by Red Hat with other IT leaders and through extensive testing, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 drives added value for specific hardware configurations and workloads, including the Arm and POWER architectures as well as real-time applications and SAP solutions.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 forms the foundation for Red Hat’s entire hybrid cloud portfolio, starting with Red Hat OpenShift 4 and the upcoming Red Hat OpenStack Platform 15. Also built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, a minimal footprint operating system designed to host Red Hat OpenShift deployments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is also broadly supported as a guest operating system on Red Hat hybrid cloud infrastructure, including Red Hat OpenShift 4, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 15 and Red Hat Virtualization 4.3.

The launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 also coincides with the general availability of the Red Hat Universal Base Image , a userspace image derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux for building Red Hat certified Linux containers. The Red Hat Universal Base Image is available to all developers with or without a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, providing a more secure and reliable foundation for building enterprise-ready containerized applications. Applications built with the Universal Base Image can be run anywhere and will experience the benefits of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux life cycle and support from Red Hat when run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Press webcast

Red Hat will host a press conference live from Red Hat Summit at 11 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, May 8. Following remarks, press and analysts are invited to participate in a live question and answer session.

To register for the press conference or view the replay after the event, visit https://onlinexperiences.com/Launch/QReg/ShowUUID=45D50AF9-7E2C-4F8C-8606-B85EBDA927AC

Supporting Quotes

Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat

"Over the past two decades, we’ve seen Linux grow from a niche operating system to a default for enterprise datacenters. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been at the forefront of this evolution, supporting nearly every workload and enterprise IT environment that our partners and customers can conceive. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 continues this work, but delivers more than just production-ready Linux; it provides a catalyst for innovation at cloud-scale. "

Stefanie Chiras, vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat

"Innovation and Linux are inseparable - from building the Internet’s backbone to forming the first neurons of AI, Linux drives IT’s present and future. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 embraces the role of Linux as IT’s innovation engine, crystallizing it into an accessible, trusted and more secure platform. Spanning the entirety of the hybrid cloud, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform provides a catalyst for IT organizations to do more than simply meet today’s challenges; it gives them the foundation and tools to launch their own future, wherever they want it to be."

Fabio Martinez, senior manager, Architecture & Global Deployment, BBVA

"As we work to digitally transform our company to provide more services faster to our customers, we still need to have a stable, more secure operating system underpinning our IT environment. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 emphasizes providing innovation along with hardened code and security updates, key characteristics for us as we build our cloud-native strategy with Red Hat’s hybrid cloud technologies, including Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform."

Jim Nauer, IT engineer, Case Western Reserve University

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Application Streams will allow us to provide our researchers an OS platform with not only an enterprise support lifecycle, but also access to up-to-date languages and tools in a way that interoperates easily with third-party source code."

Tibor Incze, technical lead, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Datacom Systems Ltd.

"The capacity for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 to not only run multiple versions of the same application or database on a specific operating system but to also have a clear and efficient way to manage them is a significant benefit to Datacom and our customers. As we continue to execute on our internal DevOps strategy, we’re also pleased to see improved container capabilities in the operating system and extensive automation, all factors that will help us bring differentiated services to our end users."

Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice president, Partners Ecosystem, Google Cloud

"Google Cloud and Red Hat are deepening our collaboration to enable enterprise-grade solutions for customers with the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 on Google Cloud. We’re excited to bring together our innovative technologies and services to help even more businesses gain the benefits of cloud."

Arvind Krishna, senior vice president, Cloud and Cognitive Software, IBM

"As companies enter the next phase of their cloud journey, they need a hybrid cloud strategy that incorporates their own data centers with multiple private and public clouds in an open and secure way. IBM and Red Hat have been working together for more than 20 years to drive innovation through open source, first with IBM serving as an early supporter of Linux, helping to develop and grow it for the enterprise, and more recently to bring Kubernetes and hybrid cloud solutions to customers."

Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC

"Enterprises need to build and modernize their infrastructure upon a more secure, stable, high-performing platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the foundation for the enterprise hybrid cloud, designed to scale to meet the needs of organizations today and tomorrow with the same user experience regardless of the underlying infrastructure."

John Gossman, distinguished engineer, Microsoft Azure

"We have seen growth in applications being deployed using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure, including Microsoft SQL Server, for cloud-native, hybrid, and cloud migration scenarios. We’re excited to see what customers will create with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 on Azure with continued integrated support from Microsoft and Red Hat, as well as the operating system’s new capabilities to build applications for workloads like AI."

Arlen Shenkman, executive vice president, Global Business Development and Ecosystems, SAP

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for SAP Solutions offers high availability capabilities, which are important for SAP workloads, and downtime is unacceptable for business critical applications such as S/4HANA. For more than two decades, we've worked with Red Hat on maintaining a stable, open foundation for SAP applications, helping our customers make smarter decisions, faster, across the hybrid cloud."

Jason Beard, senior Linux administrator, Stream (Stream Energy)

"The energy market is complex and highly competitive, especially when it comes to being able to deliver updated information as quickly as possible to our customers. As an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux user, the in-place upgrade capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 provide an opportunity for us to continue answering customer demand without taking systems offline to upgrade the operating system. We are also very interested in the container capabilities presented by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, especially as our development environment continues to evolve to drive additional business value."