Red Hat has introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, the Linux operating system designed to drive more consistent innovation across the open hybrid cloud, from bare-metal servers to cloud providers and the farthest edge of enterprise networks. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is designed to drive enterprise transformation in parallel with evolving market forces and customer demands in an automated and distributed IT world. The platform will be generally available in the coming weeks.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has served as the backbone of enterprise IT, both in the data center and in the cloud, emphasizing customer choice and flexibility. With this platform for innovation, Red Hat customers can choose their underlying architecture, application vendor, or cloud provider with the consistency necessary for modern IT. Combined, this has resulted in Red Hat Enterprise Linux becoming an epicenter for innovation.

Building on decades of relentless innovation, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform is the first production release built from CentOS Stream, the continuously delivered Linux distribution that tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This approach helps the broader Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem, from partners to customers to independent users, provide feedback, code, and feature updates to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.

Customers can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux wherever and however it makes sense for their unique operational requirements with broad availability and deployment options across major cloud marketplaces. Existing customers can migrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions to the cloud of their choice with Red Hat Cloud Access, while any customer looking to adopt the scale and power of the cloud will be able to deploy the platform on-demand from major cloud provider marketplaces, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Red Hat and AWS have worked together for more than a decade to support the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at launch on AWS. Most recently, customers can now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based workloads on AWS instances that use ARM-designed Graviton processors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 integration with AWS Graviton processors helps to optimize the price performance for a wide range of cloud workloads running in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 retains Red Hat’s commitment to delivering a hardened Linux platform that can handle the most sensitive workloads, pairing innovation with extended security capabilities. Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions also include access to Red Hat Insights, Red Hat’s continuous, proactive analytics service for detecting and remediating potential configuration and vulnerability issues while optimizing resource and subscription usage across the hybrid cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 also supports kernel lives to patch from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console, further automating how IT organizations can address critical tasks at scale. This enables IT operations teams to apply updates across large, distributed system deployments without having to access command-line tooling, making it easier to address production-impacting issues from the core datacenter to multiple clouds to the edge.

Building on the strategic alliance expanded with Microsoft in 2015, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, available at launch on Microsoft Azure, provides a foundation ready for key Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft SQL Server, thanks to joint engineering efforts with Microsoft. This includes tailored performance co-pilot modules, tuned profiles, a SQL Server system role powered by Ansible, and more. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 also continues to fully support .NET development and applications, bringing applications built using Microsoft’s development platform to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.

Availability

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 will be generally available in the coming weeks via the Red Hat Customer Portal and major cloud provider marketplaces. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is also accessible via no-cost Red Hat Developer programs that provide developers with access to software, how-to videos, demos, getting started guides, documentation, and more.