Today, we’re pleased to announce that the latest beta version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform , Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.2, is now available. Maintaining our commitment to a predictable, six-month release cadence for minor platform releases, RHEL 8.2 Beta is designed to make it easier for IT organizations to adopt new, production-ready innovations faster. This same cadence and engineering process is also intended to help our hardware partners more quickly deliver supported hardware configurations, furthering customer choice for their datacenter estates.

Beyond the continued benefits of the regular release cadence, RHEL 8.2 drives enhancements to the user experience for both new and existing customers, extends monitoring and performance capabilities and adds new supported developer languages and tools.

Enhancing the user experience

To streamline how new and existing users register a RHEL subscription, RHEL 8.2 Beta makes subscription registration a step in the installation process. This eliminates the need to do a YUM update immediately after installation to confirm a registered RHEL subscription. Additionally, Red Hat Insights , Red Hat’s proactive management analytics service that helps to keep RHEL systems running at a high level, can be enabled during the installation process. This capability delivers Insights monitoring immediately after the installation is finished.

RHEL 8.2 Beta also adds new capabilities to help IT operations teams and administrators better control the lifecycle of their RHEL estate. While the benefits of a RHEL subscription apply regardless of the version of the operating system installed, as technology and business needs change, moving to newer RHEL releases may be required. RHEL 8.2 Beta offers the opportunity for IT teams to begin testing in these scenarios with in-place upgrades from RHEL 6/7 to RHEL 8, especially as RHEL 6 reaches the end of maintenance phase two in November 2020.

Monitoring and performance

As enterprise IT estates grow in size and scale across hybrid and multicloud infrastructure, being able to more effectively monitor, manage and analyze the underlying operating system environments is a key need for enterprise IT teams. RHEL 8.2 Beta helps to further extend the monitoring and performance capabilities of the platform with the introduction of Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) 5.02, which delivers new collection agents for Microsoft SQL Server 2019. RHEL 8.2 Beta also adds tighter integration with the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) across all supported architectures.

The latest supported open source developer tools

RHEL 8 introduced Application Streams, which segregates developer languages, runtimes and other tools from the base structural packages of the operating system, improving stability without limiting application innovation. RHEL 8.2 Beta furthers this offering with new, supported developers tools through Application Streams , including:

GCC Toolset 9.1

Python 3.8

Maven 3.6

For more information on RHEL 8.2 Beta, please see the release notes. To test the beta for yourself, please access your subscription through the Red Hat Customer Portal or sign-up for a no-cost Developer Subscription.