Red Hat announces RHEL 8.1 with predictable release cadence

Red Hat has just today announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.1, promising improvements in manageability, security and performance.

RHEL 8.1 will enhance the company’s open hybrid-cloud portfolio and continue to provide a consistent user experience between on-premises and public-cloud deployments.

RHEL 8.1 is also the first release that will follow what Red Hat is calling its “predictable release cadence”. Announced at Red Hat Summit 2019, this means that minor releases will be available every six months. The expectation is that this rhythmic release cycle will make it easier both for customer organizations and other software providers to plan their upgrades.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 provides product enhancements in many areas.

Enhanced automation

All supported RHEL subscriptions now include access to Red Hat’s proactive analytics, Red Hat Insights. With more than 1,000 rules for operating RHEL systems whether on-premises or cloud deployments, Red Hat Insights help IT administrators flag potential configuration, security, performance, availability and stability issues before they impact production.

New system roles

RHEL 8.1 streamlines the process for setting up subsystems to handle specific functions such as storage, networking, time synchronization, kdump and SELinux. This expands on the variety of Ansible system roles.

Live kernel patching

RHEL 8.1 adds full support for live kernel patching. This critically important feature allows IT operations teams to deal with ongoing threats without incurring excessive system downtime. Kernel updates can be applied to remediate common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) while reducing the need for a system reboot. Additional security enhancements include enhanced CVE remediation, kernel-level memory protection and application whitelisting.

Container-centric SELinux profiles

These profiles allow the creation of more tailored security policies to control how containerized services access host-system resources, making it easier to harden systems against security threats.

Enhanced hybrid-cloud application development

A reliably consistent set of supported development tools is included, among them the latest stable versions of popular open-source tools and languages like golang and .NET Core as well as the ability to power modern data-processing workloads such as Microsoft SQL Server and SAP solutions.

Red Hat Linux 8.1 is available now for RHEL subscribers via the Red Hat Customer Portal. Red Hat Developer program members may obtain the latest releases at no cost at the Red Hat Developer site.

Additional resources

Here are some links to  additional information:

• More about Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Get a RHEL developer subscription
• More about the latest features at Red Hat Insights