Now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is generally available, we are re-casting the Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Touch Beta program into a series of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 special interest groups (SIGs), the first of which is focused on application containers. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host SIG encompasses technologies that are required to create, deploy, and manage application containers.

This is the first of several SIGs that we plan to create to focus on specific technology domains within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. By participating in SIGs, Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers can provide feedback on the active development of new capabilities to meet the needs of their specific use cases.

In addition to on-premise access delivered through the Red Hat Customer Portal, customers participating in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host SIG can now access a technology preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host on Google Compute Engine (GCE). Red Hat will work closely with these customers, with assistance from Google, to support them as they explore application containers. This helps us to gather important requirements and feedback on use cases for these technologies and enable the hybrid cloud for our joint customers.

We also announced today that Red Hat and Google are collaborating to tackle the challenge of how to manage application containers at scale, across hundreds or thousands of hosts. In June, Google unveiled the Kubernetes open source project for container management. Red Hat is joining the Kubernetes community and becoming core committers to the project to help Red Hat customers to orchestrate Docker containers across multiple hosts, running on-premise, in Google Cloud or in other public or private clouds.

Interested in working with Red Hat on technologies required to create, deploy, and manage application containers? Contact your technical account manager to participate in a SIG or get involved in one of the upstream projects, including Project Atomic and others.