A number of you have asked the question, and now we have the answer - RHEL 7 beta is now available!
See today's full announcement here, but here are some excerpts and specifics for developers.
"Today marks an exciting milestone for Red Hat as we share news of the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.
With today’s announcement, we are inviting Red Hat customers, partners, and members of the public to provide feedback on what we believe is our most ambitious release to date. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is designed to provide the underpinning for future application architectures while delivering the flexibility, scalability, and performance needed to deploy across bare metal, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure."
RHEL 7 Beta showcases hundreds of new features and enhancements, particularly in these areas:
- Linux Containers
- Performance Management
- Physical and Hosted In-place Upgrades
- File Systems
- Networking
- Storage
- Windows Interoperability
- Subsystem Management
RHEL 7 is for developers
As recently demonstrated with Red Hat Software Collections and Red Hat Developer Toolset, RHEL 7 continues to bring the latest stable versions of tools for developers. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, developers can create modern applications that can be confidently deployed into production using the latest stable technologies including:
- Development tools (OpenJDK7, gcc 4.8, Ruby 2.0, Python 2.7, PHP 5.4, Perl 5.16)
- Performance tools (OProfile, SystemTap, Valgrind, and many more)
- Databases (MariaDB 5.5, PostreSQL 9.2)
- Web server (Apache 2.4).
In addition, with the latest OpenJDK7, you'll experience quicker startup times for your applications. Plus you can install and debug with multiple JDKs in parallel while having access to the latest updates as they are released upstream.
Container lovers can develop applications to run in a secure container environment on a single host, while isolating them from other applications running in the same host operating system environment. And software collection users, as with RHEL 5 and 6, can continue to create customized software collections for flexible and consistent deployment.
We'll be creating some drill-down articles in the future, but let us know if you have any requests.
Read the full RHEL 7 announcement, or get RHEL 7 beta here.
Last updated: November 6, 2025