Red Hat Inc. announced the general release of its Linux powerhouse operating system RHEL 8 this week at Red Hat Summit in Boston. The OS is designed to span the breadth of deployments across enterprise IT, from bare-metal servers and Linux containers to public and private clouds. Throughout development, the RHEL organization went through its own digital transformation, according to Denise Dumas (pictured), vice president of the operating system platform at Red Hat Inc.

Dumas spoke with Stu Miniman (@Stu) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit in Boston. They discussed the challenges and benefits of RHEL 8, what the company is doing to better support the cloud ecosystem, and how Red Hat’s processes have changed to improve efficiency for customers (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Walls: How do you feel when something like [RHEL 8]  gets moved out of beta space?

Dumas: I’m thrilled. In a way, it’s almost an anti-climax because we’re talking about RHEL 9 already, but this is a great time to just take a moment and say, “It’s out. Let’s see if they like it. I hope they do.” We’ve had 40,000 downloads of the beta, and we’ve had tremendous feedback. It’s been fabulous to see how many people pick it up and tell us what they like and don’t like about it.

Miniman: Years-worth of coding went into this. Give us a look behind the curtain, if you would.

Dumas: As with everything else that Red Hat does, this is totally open source. Many communities feed into Fedora, and Fedora feeds into RHEL, so we took Fedora 28, pulled it in, and did a lot more work on it. This year, we’ve done the [distribution] differently. There’s a core kernel … and then there are the application streams. So we’ve done a lot of work to separate out the two types of package that make up RHEL so we can spin the application streams faster. So we tried to make the admin side happy and the developer side happy.

Walls: Was there a point in the process where you just had an “uh-oh” moment? It’s not always smooth sailing in terms of what you were trying to enable? Talk about that journey from the engineering side of the equation and some of the hiccups you’ve encountered along the way.

Dumas: RHEL 8 has been interesting because in putting the product together, the RHEL organization went through our own digital transformation. Our partners in QE and in support have worked to put the operating system together in a much more agile way. That has been a real interesting process and a real challenge because it’s required many people to change the work processes they’ve relied on for several years. There’s been times where it’s too much too fast, and everyone has had to be willing to adapt.

When you pull a kernel out of the upstream, some of the features are solid; some are less solid. We have to make an educated call about what’s ready to go and what’s not. So, figuring out the kernel configuration can take a while, and that has been interesting. It’s also becoming harder to find the right level of Linux expertise, and when you find these people, you don’t want to waste time on things that could be automated, so we’ve had to do a lot of work on the management tooling to make sure daily tasks were easier and better integrated with Satellite.

Miniman: It’s been five years since your last major release. From an application standpoint, there’s such breadth and depth, and it seems like more effort is necessary to support the multicloud ecosystem today than what was needed 10 years ago.

Dumas: Well, we have lots of partnerships with software vendors. We’ve also done lots of work with Nvidia this year, and we’ve done a lot more to make sure the workloads are happy. But when you containerize, you need a user space that you bring along — your libraries, your container runtime, etc. So we’ve taken a lot of the RHEL user space content and we’re putting it into something called the Universal Base Image. You can rely on that when you put your application into the container. You can get updates, so you can stay on top of your security, and we’ll support it for you.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. 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