Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8) was released on 2019-05-07. The first beta was announced on 14 November 2018.

There are lot of opportunities in Devops to improve the IT infra to next generation so, Red Hat is more focus on this area.

To give more space to developers, they were added a lot of tools that developer-friendly capabilities.

IT infra has been moved from Physical servers to Virtual servers. Now, we are migrating from Virtual servers to Containers & Kubernetes.

Overview:

There are numerous changes in the RHEL 8, those are most developer-friendly capabilities.

RHEL 8 is based on Fedora 28 and uses an upstream Linux kernel 4.18.

This release provides a stable, secure and good foundation to deploy Linux containers to public and private clouds, which support customer’s workloads and operations seamlessly.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Life Cycle:

Red Hat offers subscription services for each major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux throughout there life cycle.

Below are the life cycle Phases.

• Full Support – 5 Years
• Maintenance Support – 5 Years
• Extended Life-cycle Support (ELS) – 2 Years

How To Download RHEL 8?

Make sure you should have at least one active Red Hat subscription to download Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 ISO image file from the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Download Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

Architectures:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 provides support for the following architectures.

• AMD and Intel 64-bit architectures
• The 64-bit ARM architecture
• IBM Power Systems, Little Endian
• IBM Z

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Repository Architecture:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 has three pre-enabled repositories, those are below.

• BaseOS – It has core operating system content
• Application Streams (AppStream) — It has developer tools.
• CodeReady Builder — Additional libraries and developer tools

AppStream Repository: Application Streams, essentially the next generation of Software Collections, which provide additional functionality beyond what is available in BaseOS.

If there is a market demand then the requested package newer and stable versions will be added here. It helps user to install the latest package versions.

Linux Containers:

Linux containers are a critical component of cloud-native development and microservices. We are more focusing on these area to improve our IT infrastructure.

Following tools help developers find, run, build and share containerized applications more quickly and efficiently.

• Buildah – building containers.
• Podman – running containers
• Skopeo – sharing/finding containers.

YUM – Software Management:

YUM version has been upgraded from YUM v3 to YUM v4. YUM package manager is now based on the DNF package manager.

It supports for modular content, increased performance, and a well-designed stable API. These advantages made a drastic improvement over the previous YUM v3.

Other Notable RHEL 8 New Features:

• Cockpit is available in the default RHEL repos. Cockpit is a web-based tool used by the sysadmin to manage systems.
• Gnome v3.28 is shipped with RHEL 8.
• RHEL 8 uses Wayland as default display server instead of X.org.
• Startis – It’s a new volume management tool.
• iptables is replaced by nftables
• It supports up to 4PB of physical memory.
• nobody user replaced by nfsnobody
• RHEL 8 is loaded with latest version of packages like Python 3.6, Nginx 1.14, Apache 2.4.35, PHP 7.2, Ruby 2.5, Perl 5.26, etc,.

These are the things that we found while reading official RHEL 8 release notes.

If we missed some of the major things, I’m requesting you to update the same in the comment section.

It will help us to update it in our article. It could help other readers to get full information.

Reference Links:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 release notes
Red Hat Developer page update about RHEL 8.0
Red Hat Press Release about RHEL 8.0