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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Debuts
May 16, 2022
 Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is the Linux
operating system designed to drive more
consistent innovation across the open hybrid
cloud, from bare metal servers to cloud
providers and the farthest edge of
enterprise networks. Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 9 is designed to drive enterprise
transformation in parallel with evolving
market forces and customer demands in an
automated and distributed IT world. The
platform will be generally available in the
coming weeks.
From vast public clouds and tiny edge
devices to simple containerized applications
and complex artificial intelligence
workloads, modern IT starts with Linux.
Matthew Hicks, Executive Vice President,
Products and Technologies with Red Hat said,
“From vast public clouds and tiny edge
devices to simple containerized applications
and complex artificial intelligence
workloads, modern IT starts with Linux. As
the world’s leading enterprise Linux
platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 extends
wherever needed across the open hybrid cloud
and beyond, pairing the trusted backbone of
enterprise Linux with the innovative
catalysts of open source communities. Linux
is positioned at the epicenter of rapid
technological evolution and that Linux is
Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
For two decades, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
has served as the backbone of enterprise IT,
both in the datacenter and in the cloud,
emphasizing customer choice and flexibility.
With this platform for innovation, Red Hat
customers can choose their underlying
architecture, application vendor or cloud
provider with the consistency necessary for
modern IT. Combined, this has resulted in
Red Hat Enterprise Linux becoming an
epicenter for innovation. According to a Red
Hat-sponsored IDC study1, the global Red Hat
Enterprise Linux economy is forecast to
exceed $13 trillion in 2022. This includes
supporting the business activities of Red
Hat customers, which is estimated to provide
financial benefits totaling $1.7 trillion in
2022.
Building on decades of relentless
innovation, the latest version of the
world’s leading enterprise Linux platform is
the first production release built from
CentOS Stream, the continuously delivered
Linux distribution that tracks just ahead of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This approach
helps the broader Red Hat Enterprise Linux
ecosystem, from partners to customers to
independent users, provide feedback, code
and feature updates to the world’s leading
enterprise Linux platform.
IDC2 predicts that “by 2023, 40% of G2000
[companies will] reset cloud selection
processes to focus on business outcomes
rather than IT requirements, valuing access
to providers' portfolios from device to edge
and from data to ecosystem.” To Red Hat,
this indicates that a standardized platform
that can reach across all of these
footprints and provide an experience
optimized for both innovation and production
stability is crucial. Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 9 is engineered to address these needs
and more, enabling operations teams and
developers to deploy new initiatives without
abandoning existing workloads or systems.
A ubiquitous platform for consistent
innovation across the datacenter, cloud
providers and edge
Customers can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux
wherever and however it makes sense for
their unique operational requirements with
broad availability and deployment options
across major cloud marketplaces. Existing
customers can migrate Red Hat Enterprise
Linux subscriptions to the cloud of their
choice with Red Hat Cloud Access, while any
customer looking to adopt the scale and
power of the cloud will be able to deploy
the platform on-demand from major cloud
provider marketplaces, including Amazon Web
Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and
Microsoft Azure.
This platform ubiquity also stretches to the
edge. With enterprise interest in edge
computing growing and forecasts predicting a
market of more than a quarter trillion
dollars by 2025.3 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
incorporates key enhancements specifically
designed to address evolving IT needs at the
edge.
These capabilities include:
Comprehensive edge management, delivered
as a service, to oversee and scale remote
deployments with greater control and
security functionality, encompassing
zero-touch provisioning, system health
visibility and more responsive vulnerability
mitigations all from a single interface.
Automatic container roll-back with Podman,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s integrated
container management technology, which can
automatically detect if a newly-updated
container fails to start and then roll the
container back to the previous working
version.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 also highlights
Red Hat’s efforts to deliver key operating
system functions as services, starting with
a new image builder service. Supporting the
core platform’s existing functionality, the
service supports image creation for
customized filesystems and major cloud
providers and virtualization technologies,
including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure
and VMware.
Red Hat and AWS have worked together for
more than a decade to support the latest
version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at
launch on AWS. Most recently, customers can
now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based
workloads on AWS instances that use
ARM-designed Graviton processors. Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 9 integration with AWS
Graviton processors helps to optimize price
performance for a wide range of cloud
workloads running in Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2).
A stronger backbone for innovation
everywhere
As IT teams adopt new technologies and
extend into new operating footprints, the
threat landscape becomes more dynamic and
complex. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 retains
Red Hat’s commitment to delivering a
hardened Linux platform that can handle the
most sensitive workloads, pairing innovation
with extended security capabilities. Red Hat
Enterprise Linux subscriptions also include
access to Red Hat Insights, Red Hat’s
continuous, proactive analytics service for
detecting and remediating potential
configuration and vulnerability issues while
optimizing resource and subscription usage
across the hybrid cloud.
Beyond the hardening, testing and
vulnerability scanning that all Red Hat
Enterprise Linux releases undergo, Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 9 incorporates features
which help address hardware-level security
vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown as
well as capabilities to help user-space
processes create memory areas that are
inaccessible to potentially malicious code.
The platform provides readiness for customer
security requirements as well, supporting
PCI-DSS, HIPAA and more.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 also introduces
integrity measurement architecture (IMA)
digital hashes and signatures. With
integrity measurement architecture, users
can verify the integrity of the operating
system with digital signatures and hashes.
This helps to detect rogue infrastructure
modifications, making it easier to limit the
potential for systems to be compromised.
Further supporting enterprise choice in
architectures and environments across the
open hybrid cloud, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 will be available on IBM Cloud and also
complements the key security features and
capabilities of IBM Power Systems and IBM Z
systems. Pairing the security-focused
hardware capabilities of IBM’s architectures
with the security enhancements in Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 9 delivers the innovation,
strength and security capabilities that many
organizations need in hybrid cloud
computing.
Consistent automation and development
across the hybrid cloud
As IT systems grow to encompass a wider
variety of workloads and footprints, IT
operations teams are using automated systems
and tooling as force multipliers. Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 9 helps IT organizations
embrace automation across the hybrid cloud,
with capabilities tailored to help cut
complexity and enhance manageability.
The platform introduces an expanded set of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles, which
provide an automated workflow for creating
specific system configurations. Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 9 further builds out this
selection, adding new System Roles for
Postfix, high-availability clusters,
firewall, Microsoft SQL Server, web console
and more.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 also supports
kernel live patching from the Red Hat
Enterprise Linux web console, further
automating how IT organizations can address
critical tasks at scale. This enables IT
operations teams to apply updates across
large, distributed system deployments
without having to access command line
tooling, making it easier to address
production-impacting issues from the core
datacenter to multiple clouds to the edge.
Building on the strategic alliance expanded
with Microsoft in 2015, Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 9, available at launch on Microsoft
Azure, provides a foundation ready for key
Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft
SQL Server, thanks to joint engineering
efforts with Microsoft. This includes
tailored performance co-pilot modules, tuned
profiles, a SQL Server system role powered
by Ansible and more. Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 9 also continues to fully support .NET
development and applications, bringing
applications built using Microsoft’s
development platform to the world’s leading
enterprise Linux platform.
Availability
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 will be
generally available in the coming weeks via
the Red Hat Customer Portal and major cloud
provider marketplaces. Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 9 is also accessible via no-cost Red
Hat Developer programs that provide
developers with access to software, how-to
videos, demos, getting started guides,
documentation and more.
Ashesh Badani, senior vice president,
Products, Red Hat
“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 continues Red
Hat’s commitment to matching the relentless
pace of IT innovation across industries. The
platform is designed for an automated world,
where the operating system forms the
connection point between otherwise disparate
and disconnected environments and
technologies. Whether it's extending
existing skills into new IT footprints or
helping to bring cloud-native workloads to
production, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
provides the innovation engine for the
modern and future enterprise.”
Fred Wurden, vice president, AWS
Commercial Software Services
AWS and Red Hat have collaborated for over a
decade to provide enterprise-ready cloud
computing solutions for customers. Now, we
bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, a more
consistent and innovative Linux platform
onto AWS, enabling customers to run their
mission critical workloads on over 500
generally available instance types including
the most advanced ARM-based AWS Graviton
processors which power the latest generation
of Amazon EC2 instances.”
Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president,
Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and
Technologies Group, IDC
“IT is no longer limited to the corporate
datacenter or to public cloud deployments -
instead, systems and operating environments
must extend out to the furthest edges of the
digital domain. As with virtualization and
cloud computing before it, this new paradigm
benefits from a standardized Linux platform
such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which
gives IT teams a common foundation for
innovation no matter where they operate.”
Mike Cross, principal product owner,
GlaxoSmithKline
“High-performance computing is a critical
component of pharmaceutical innovation, as
being able to quickly identify and analyze
new global health challenges is crucial to
our corporate mission. Red Hat Enterprise
Linux supports these environments for us,
and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is poised to
drive even greater performance out of these
production systems in our efforts to help
communities around the world adapt to a
changing health landscape.”
 Hillery
Hunter, general manager, Cloud Industry
Platforms and Solutions, CTO, IBM Cloud
“With IBM Cloud, clients can take advantage
of an open cloud architecture to accelerate
the pace which they can drive innovation,
while still prioritizing security and
resiliency. With support of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, our clients, particularly
those in highly regulated industries like
financial services, can be assured they are
using an environment designed with security
and enterprise capabilities in mind. As
organizations prioritize security,
compliance and modernization velocity, this
environment can help them manage workloads
across their hybrid cloud environments to
provide a consistent experience.”
Omar Khan, General Manager, Azure
Infrastructure, Microsoft Corporation
“We look forward to helping our customers
continue to innovate as they migrate to the
cloud. As businesses extend workloads from
the cloud to the edge, solutions like Red
Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure
offer benefits for the enterprise, including
automated Red Hat Enterprise Linux workloads
through Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
on Azure.”
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