10 essential cloud articles to read in 2024

Red Hat has been providing solutions for the cloud for a long time, and continued to forge that path throughout 2024. With Red Hat technology, you’re not limited to what public cloud providers offer. You have options. You can build and manage as much or as little of your platform as you need. That flexibility has been reflected in this year’s blog posts, with authors highlighting some drop-in components that provide new functionality, as well as some of the tools you can use to create your own custom solutions.

1. Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux: A quick start guide

The cloud is all about scale, but more isn’t necessarily always better. What you scale matters, and that starts with the image your containers and pods are based upon. Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) uses the same tools, skills, and patterns as containerized applications to deliver an operating system that’s easy to build, ship and run. In this article, Ben Breard demonstrates how to build a custom image for your containers, how to push that image to a registry and how to deploy it across your cloud.

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2. Red Hat Enterprise Linux scalable pricing to cloud partners announcement

Workloads running in the public cloud demand a variety of small, medium and large core counts, and memory, to meet application needs. In response to this need, cloud providers continue to introduce a wide range of scalable instance sizes. By January 2024, RHEL’s pricing model for cloud partners had been implemented a decade ago, and needed updating to meet the requirements of both customers and partners.

The new RHEL pricing to cloud partners, which went into effect at the start of April 2024, scales by vCPU count. This is consistent with the most common model for cloud virtual machines and software.

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3. Simplify hybrid cloud operations with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4

Architecting, deploying and managing hybrid cloud environments can be a challenging and time-consuming process. RHEL has several features to help sysadmins of bare metal and cloud installs alike.

The processor support expanded to include 64-bit Arm, and the web console lets you manage systems across your network from a single interface. The image builder enables you to consistently provision RHEL hosts to support standardized operating environments (SOE), and Red Hat Insights provides recommendations and information to help you build RHEL images more efficiently, and in less time. RHEL system roles allows you to automate common management tasks across on-site infrastructure, cloud resources and even edge devices. The list hardly stops there, so be sure to read the full article to learn about even more features.

4. Introducing OpenShift Service Mesh 2.5

Istio is an open source service mesh that enables encrypted communication within a cluster, load balancing, a configuration API and much more. Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh is based on Istio and Kiali (a console for Istio), and in March 2024, it reached version 2.5 with several improvements and new features. There were updates from Istio 1.17 and 1.18, including patch releases up to Istio 1.18.7. It added support for Certificate Revocation Lists for external traffic, developer preview support for dual-stack IPv4/IPv6, and updates to the Gateway API. This is all included at all subscription levels of Red Hat OpenShift, so if you’re using OpenShift and you’re not using OpenShift Service Mesh yet, you need to read this article.

5. Running the Leapp pre-upgrade analysis to take the unknowns out of your next RHEL upgrade

Seamlessly upgrading an operating system in-place can be challenging. There are potential package incompatibilities, kernel customizations or outdated and unsupported modules to consider. To help with this, the Leapp tool offered in RHEL supports you through an in-place upgrade of your system from supported versions of RHEL. With Leapp, you can run a pre-upgrade analysis to reveal inconsistencies that could cause issues or prevent an upgrade. You do this before you start upgrading, so you know well in advance what you need to take into account.

If you’re upgrading RHEL systems, make it easier on yourself by reading this article.

6. Leveraging confidential computing for peace of mind

When using the public cloud, you necessarily lose some control over how security is handled, and who can access elements that are often at the very foundation of your company’s business. This can be a problem when the way you manage your services and data is regulated by local laws (for example, in the Financial Services and insurance industry). The primary way to address this challenge is through confidential computing. To help solve this problem, Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers, built on Kata Containers, provide the additional capability to run confidential containers. A confidential container is deployed within an isolated hardware enclave, which helps protect data and code from privileged users such as cloud or cluster administrators.

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7. Power monitoring for Red Hat OpenShift: Technology Preview

In January 2024, power monitoring for Red Hat OpenShift became a Technology Preview, providing power monitoring as an integral component of the sustainable-computing upstream community initiative. Power monitoring for Red Hat OpenShift is a set of tools enabling you to monitor power consumption of workloads running in an OpenShift cluster. You can use this information to, for example, pinpoint the most power-intensive namespace, or formulate a strategic plan to minimize energy consumption.

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8. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Secure Boot in the cloud

Secure boot technology is part of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification. It is a powerful tool that allows only trusted code to be executed on a system. secure boot is common in hardware, but is relatively young within the cloud (Red Hat was an early adopter, and has supported it since 2014). Secure boot is a crucial piece of Confidential Virtual Machines (CVM) enablement. In particular, CVM implementation must guarantee that only trusted bits are present in the boot chain. If you’re processing sensitive information on the cloud, read this article.

9. A guide to installing and configuring Red Hat Satellite Capsule server

Red Hat Satellite is an infrastructure management solution designed to streamline management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems at scale. A Red Hat Satellite Capsule Server provides federated services for discovering, provisioning and configuring hosts outside of your primary Satellite server. A Satellite Capsule Server allows you to manage RHEL hosts across multiple platforms and geographic locations. This helps with load and congestion when you have a large number of systems. Not only that, a Satellite Capsule Server maximizes availability by enabling content and software to be accessed by systems even when the Satellite Capsule Server is unavailable.

In short, with a Satellite Capsule Server, you extend the reach and scalability of your Satellite deployment. Read the article for details.

10. Red Hat transforms application connectivity for the hybrid cloud with Red Hat Connectivity Link

Many modern enterprises deploy services and applications to multiple Kubernetes clusters running in multiple data centers, cloud providers and at the edge. As a result, platform engineers face the daunting task of configuring, managing and securing these connections while at the same time providing a self-service environment for the development teams they support. Red Hat Connectivity Link provides multi-cluster ingress management, global load balancing, the programmatic shifting of applications or workloads between clusters, rate limiting, authentication and authorization for API access, and much more.

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