Red Hat Gives Developers Access to Free RHEL Licenses

5 Ways to Get Developers to Adopt Your APIs

Red Hat this week announced that it is making a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscription available to developers at no cost.

Ray Ploski, director of developer strategy for Red Hat, says that rather than hoping that developers who create applications on a free distribution of Linux from some other vendor port their apps to RHEL in a production environment, Red Hat wants to remove any friction that would get in the way of those applications being hosted on RHEL in a production environment.

In fact, Ploski notes that, thanks to the rise of DevOps, the amount of time it takes for an application to move from a test to a production environment has decreased considerably. In many instances, IT organizations are using the same underlying operating system in both environments to not only better reflect the environment where that application will ultimately run, but also to eliminate the need to refactor that application as it moves from one environment to another.

Thanks to the rise of containers and microservices, Ploski says, the application development pipeline will collapse even further as the rate at which new applications are built and updated continues to increase. The challenge facing IT operations teams is figuring out which applications need to be dynamically updated versus those that are core elements of the enterprise and need to be updated in a more deliberate fashion.

In the meantime, Red Hat is clearly committed to owning both ends of that pipeline.