Red Hat: The beta version of RHEL 8 displays modular application streams

Linux distributor Red Hat unveiled the first beta version of the next version 8 of its RHEL business distribution. As usual, the new version includes some features that have been used for a long time in Fedora, the main community distribution supported by Red Hat. These include, among other things, the application flows in RHEL 8.

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These must allow a faster update of the underlying system. This mainly concerns different versions of a package, such as the environments of a programming language or application, which are now available side by side. This makes it easier for users to access current applications.

As a system-wide innovation, RHEL 8 now supports OpenSSL 1.1.1 by default and therefore also TLS 1.3. In addition, the strategies that can be created from the system from a command prompt allow users to set encryption standards without having to tailor individual application strategies.

More for the cloud

As you can imagine, RHEL 8 also includes tools that make container handling easier. These include Buildah for creating container images, Podman for container management and Skopeo for locating and distributing containers in the corresponding registers. Red Hat says they are not a central daemon of the system.

For system administration and administrators, Red Hat offers the Composer tool, which allows users to bademble their own images with specific package compositions. This should better correspond to the many different deployment scenarios in virtualized and cloud environments. For package management in RHEL 8, Yum 4 is used. It is simply an unnamed version of the Fedora package management DNF file.

Not surprisingly, RHEL 8 includes the new Stratis storage tool, which aims to bring XFS closer to Btrfs and ZFS capabilities. As probably the most important features, Stratis provides snapshots and so-called storage pools.

More details can be found in the announcement. RHEL beta 8 is available as a public beta for download. The final version of RHEL 8 is expected to be released this summer.