Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta is here

And it’s been built with production stability and development agility in mind.

There’s so much to say about RHEL 8 Beta, but I want to focus on just a few points from the corporate announcement that highlight Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta as a developer platform that:

Simplifies application development - with less setup and config effort, you can more quickly get to writing code
Is the easiest RHEL yet for developers that are new to Linux
Is for traditional and cloud/container applications with many new tools for both
Already delivers dozens of tools to build and test applications

Now let’s zoom in on what these mean.

Download the RHEL 8 Beta here.

“Too slow, too fast”

We’ve gotten this feedback a lot when discussing availability and support of development packages. To address this dichotomy, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta has built in the concept of Application Streams to deliver userspace packages (programming languages, compilers, databases, etc.) more simply and with greater flexibility - this addresses the “too slow”. For the “too fast” requirement, there are also “Core” components that have the same lifecycle as the operating system - 10 years. Users will often have a version in each grouping. Application Streams - think of them as “son of Software Collections” - are a simpler way to deliver this modularity with improved installation, use, and re-use

OS Architecture

To simplify your development experience, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 has been simplified since it is based on two pre-enabled repositories:

BaseOS - “mostly” OS content
Application Stream (AppStream) - most developer tools will be here

Content in BaseOS is intended to provide the core set of the underlying operating system functionality that provides the foundation for all installations. This content is available in the traditional RPM format. For a list of BaseOS packages, see Appendix A, Packages in BaseOS.

Content in Application Streams is intended to provide additional functionality beyond what is available in BaseOS. This content set includes additional user space applications, runtime languages, and databases that support the varied workloads and use cases, e.g. “Too Slow”. Content in AppStream is available in one of two formats - the familiar RPM format and an extension to the RPM format called modules that simply package use/re-use. Components build as modules (e.g PHP) are called streams (e.g PHP 7.2). For a list of AppStream packages, see Appendix B, Packages in AppStream.

Linux containers

Linux containers are a critical component of digital transformation (or cloud-native or however you want to label it), so Red Hat’s lightweight, open standards-based container toolkit is now fully supported and included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Built with enterprise IT security needs in mind, Buildah (container building), Podman (running containers) and Skopeo (sharing/finding containers) help developers find, run, build and share containerized applications more quickly and efficiently, thanks to the distributed and daemonless nature of the tools. '

Developer tools

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 includes dozens of tools and we’ve already assembled a number of How-to guides to get you started. Read about them on the developers.redhat.com/rhel8. We’ll be added more How-to’s throughout the beta, so visit the

Download it

There are 3 ways to access RHEL 8 beta and they based on your existing relationship with Red Hat:

Current Red Hat Developer members can login and download today at Red Hat Developer.
If you’re not a Red Hat Developer member, sign-up (it’s free and easy to do) and download RHEL 8 beta.
If you’re a current Red Hat Enterprise Linux corporate customer, log into the Customer Portal to participate in the RHEL 8 customer beta.

Resources

Read about more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta announcement regarding new capabilities on:

Networking
Security
Systems management
File systems and storage

Download the RHEL 8 Beta here.

References:

Last updated: March 24, 2023

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta is here