Two things that keep IT managers up at night these days are security and figuring out how to manage IT at scale. Red Hat has previewed an upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that promises to address both issues.
Steve Almy, principal product manager for RHEL, says the beta version of RHEL 7.4 sports much tighter integration with the open source Ansible IT automation framework that Red Hat acquired in 2015. In fact, Almy notes that integration with Ansible is a top priority for most Red Hat customers.
“Customers have been clamoring for it,” says Almy.
On the security front, RHEL 7.4 will provide support for disk encryption that can only be decrypted when that disk is attached to a specific network. Other new security-related features include full support for the OpenSSL HTTP/2.0 protocol and the ability to filter audit events to make it easier for administrators to figure out what occurred when.
Other new features to be included in RHEL 7.4 include the ability to more easily change RAID configurations as well as enhanced network management and analytics tools.
Red Hat is not committing to when RHEL 7.4 will be generally available. But given the amount of pressure IT managers are under these days, chances are high that many IT shops that have standardized on RHEL will be looking to make a transition sooner than later.
