Linux vendor Red Hat has been working toward the next major release of its flagship platform for much of the last two years and is now gearing up for the home stretch. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 platform was first released in 2010 and recently updated to version 6.5. Next year is now looking like the year in which Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is likely to debut, and it could include a new approach to virtualization

In a video interview with eWEEK, Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat, discusses what the future holds for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its upcoming RHEL 7 release.

"RHEL 7 is going to be awesome," Stevens said.

The technologies that will be included in RHEL 7 are what Stevens defined as enablers for the cloud at both the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) level with OpenStack and at a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) level with OpenShift.

One of the key technologies that RHEL 7 is likely to introduce is support for the Docker container virtualization technology. Docker is an up-and-coming technology that provides a different model for virtualization. Instead of the traditional hypervisor model that leverages virtual machines with their own operating system sitting on top of a host operating system, Docker uses virtual application containers that sit on top of the host operating system.

In a recent video interview with eWEEK, Docker CEO Ben Golub detailed why container technology will revolutionize the virtualization landscape.

Red Hat already has a publicly announced working relationship with Docker for integration efforts around the community Fedora Linux distribution.

"We view containers as a core common property that we need in RHEL, OpenShift and OpenStack," Stevens said.

Stevens wasn't certain if Docker will end up in the first RHEL 7 beta release, but he said that it was his expectation for Docker to be part of RHEL 7.

While Stevens did not provide any specific timing for the release of RHEL 7, he strongly hinted that 2014 is going to be a big year for the platform. He added that RHEL 7 will be a key topic for discussion at the Red Hat Summit 2014 event currently scheduled for April 14-17 in San Francisco.

Watch the full video interview with Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat, below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalis.