Reposted from the RHEL blog and written by Bhavna Sarathy.
What if you could run your existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 without porting or making changes to your source code? Today, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform image, which allows for the creation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6-based application containers. Applications that have been developed, tested, and certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 systems can now be deployed as a container and run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 as a container host.
This new platform image allows customers to containerize new and existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 applications, and deploy them to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with no porting or changes to source code. This gives customers the flexibility to confidently run their containerized applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host (currently in High Touch Beta). This also opens up the vast ecosystem of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 ISV applications to enterprises seeking to standardize on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, giving Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 applications first-class status alongside modern composite applications on Red Hat’s cutting edge platforms.
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform image allows for:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers to create and deliver secure container images of existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 applications.
- Deployment of those applications to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 without porting or changing source code.
- Red Hat ISV partners and customers to rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 as a leading enterprise-grade container host for existing or new applications developed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
- Customers to gain additional deployment flexibility for applications developed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
- Customers to more quickly take advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and containerization without compromising on the reliability and security they have gained by standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the most widely deployed enterprise Linux application platform.
Red Hat is committed to helping our customers adopt container technology in a safe and secure way, to drive innovation without compromising existing infrastructure investments. The availability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform image marks another milestone in our focus on developing, integrating, and testing a trusted, supported application platform stack for containerized applications. Its availability opens up the entire ecosystem of applications developed and certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to take advantage of Red Hat’s vision of application portability through container certification. This allows partners and customers to protect investments in their existing applications while taking advantage of the most innovative technologies and practices, like cloud computing and DevOps.
Containerization helps to address the deployment challenges customers face in heterogeneous environments that prevent enterprise IT from being as agile and flexible as required today. Red Hat solutions implement container support for applications so that they can be safely deployed, certified, and supported across a wide range of choices – bare metal, virtual machines, private clouds, and certified public clouds – extending the vision of the Open Hybrid Cloud. Red Hat is working to extend container portability to Red Hat OpenShift to provide an optimized on-ramp to Platform-as-a-Service. Containerized applications built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 can be delivered, deployed and operated across the hybrid cloud at scale, with the full backing of Red Hat’s proven, enterprise-class support and services.
Red Hat customers and partners can access the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform image in the same way that they access the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 platform image today, as part of existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux Subscriptions. Visit the Red Hat Customer Portal to access the image today.
