Announcing .NET Core 2.1 for Red Hat Platforms

We are very pleased to announce the general availability of .NET Core 2.1 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift platforms!

.NET Core is the open-source, cross-platform .NET platform for building microservices. .NET Core is designed to provide the best performance at scale for applications that use microservices and containers. Libraries can be shared with other .NET platforms, such as .NET Framework (Windows) and Xamarin (mobile applications). With .NET Core you have the flexibility of building and deploying applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or in containers. Your container-based applications and microservices can easily be deployed to your choice of public or private clouds using Red Hat OpenShift. All of the features of OpenShift and Kubernetes for cloud deployments are available to you.

.NET Core 2.1 continues to broaden its support and tools for microservice development in an open source environment. The latest version of .NET Core includes the following improvements:

• Improved build performance
• Improved runtime performance
• Improved networking performance
• The new Span<T> based APIs for reducing allocations
• Extended Cryptography APIs
• API Support for Brotli compression
• A new way of deploying tools as NuGet Packages

This release further reduces platform differences between Windows and Linux.

As usual, .NET Core 2.1 is available via traditional “yum” install (rh-dotnet21) or in containers through our container catalog.

Release and support information

Developers may use .NET Core 2.1 to develop and deploy applications on:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host
• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform  
• Red Hat OpenShift Online
• Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated
• Red Hat OpenStack Platform

Following a small number of significant releases in the next few months, .NET Core 2.1 is expected to switch to long-term support (LTS) release as described in the Red Hat’s lifecycle documentation. This means that critical updates addressing security and reliability will be offered for 3 years.

For more information, please visit the following:

1. Get Started with .NET Core 2.1!
2. Visit RedHatLoves.NET
3. The Red Hat Developer Program technology page on .NET Core.
4. Red Hat Developer blogs on .NET Core
5. Product Documentation for .NET Core

For complete information on the updates and changes made in this release, please visit the project page on GitHub. Any important differences between Red Hat’s official source build and other builds that are available will be detailed in our release notes.