IBM Corp. subsidiary Red Hat today launched a public beta test of a new hosted service called Image Builder that the company said can streamline the process of assembling customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system images for hybrid cloud environments.

The service addresses the tedious and error-prone process of building or installing operating systems for deployment across a hybrid infrastructure composed of public and private clouds. Images built on virtualization platforms can require different tools and risky modifications in the public cloud, Red Hat said. The same holds true for small edge data centers.

Image Builder, which requires no setup or infrastructure, provides a single and consistent platform that can be applied to all RHEL system images, Terry Bowling, a Red Hat senior technical product manager, wrote in a blog post being published today. “No more guessing about which cloud or virtual guest agents need to be installed,” he wrote. “Simply define your very own ‘gold’ template package set and build for each target deployment environment.”

This initial release of the public beta of the Image Builder hosted service will default to building a minimal, recommended RHEL server image for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s EC2, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Future releases will support VMware Inc. vSphere virtualization, downloadable images and installation media for physical servers, customized filesystem layouts and images created from other versions of RHEL, including 9.0, 8.5, 8.4, and 7.9.

Once an image is created it is copied into the customer’s account and can be deployed into workflows. There’s an option to auto-register using an existing RHEL subscription to receive future updates. Image Builder is also available for on-premises installation. It’s available immediately from the beta version of the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console.

Photo: Red Hat