With its annual summit scheduled to be held at the end of April in virtual mode, Red Hat Inc. warmed up the enterprise crowd in advance of the main act with last week’s release of a major update for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

Red Hat’s message accompanying the latest 8.2 release for its flagship operating system was straightforward: It will continue supporting diverse enterprise workloads in the hybrid cloud with open-source enhancements.

“At RHEL we take real pride that it’s built for the enterprise, it’s built for security, it’s built for resiliency,” said Stefanie Chiras (pictured), vice president and general manager of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Business Unit at Red Hat. “It’s really a combination of having it just work, be the foundation of where you build just once, and then being able to leverage all the innovation that’s coming out of the open-source world today.”

Chiras spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. They discussed use of intelligence tools as part of the latest release, newly added support for containerized applications, and the role of consistency in RHEL’s development. (* Disclosure below.)

An intelligent operating system

One of the key features in the latest release involves the addition of an automated diagnosis and systems management capability, which is especially timely for information-technology managers. During the current coronavirus pandemic, many data centers have limited access, so being able to remotely monitor operational performance has appeal.

Red Hat Insights provides improved visibility into IT security and compliance postures.

“We’ve really moved to how we deliver an intelligent operating system,” Chiras said. “It’s an operating system that helps you bridge the gap and brings more value in your data center than you got before.”

Easily updated OpenShift

A cornerstone of Red Hat’s hybrid strategy is providing support for containerized applications, with RHEL being a foundation for Kubernetes-based OpenShift. RHEL 8.2 also includes new versions of Buildah and Skopeo for building and copying container-compatible images.

Red Hat has been focused on ensuring consistency for customers who are keenly interested in container tools. RHEL CoreOS combines updates from Container Linux with the RHEL kernel to provide a more easily managed host through OpenShift.

“What that does is provide you with an OpenShift experience that’s easy to update fully across the board, all the way down to the kernel, but you know it’s the same Linux you have in RHEL,” Chiras explained. “It’s that consistency of technology that we really strive for.”

Consistency is the key word here. Five years ago, Red Hat’s newly appointed president — Paul Cormier — described a company philosophy based on RHEL as the solid foundation for consistency across physical, virtual, private and public cloud.

“Linux and RHEL are the one thing that stays the same and helps you get the value out of all the development work you’ve already put in and make sure that translates to the future where everything is changing,” Chiras said. “How you deploy, where you deploy, what you deploy — all of that may change. But if you want to get value out of the work and development that has been done yesterday, you need something to stay the same. In our view, that’s RHEL.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE