10 Linux blog posts to bookmark now

Good infrastructure provides reliability and flexibility to an IT system, and Linux is a stable and secure foundation for servers, clouds and applications. Modern IT requires consistency combined with versatility, continuous support combined with continuous innovation. Whatever system you’re building, it can only be as robust as its infrastructure. Here are the top 10 articles that the Red Hat Blog published to help you keep up with what’s been going on with Linux and IT infrastructure in 2024.

1. Add first boot scripts to golden images with Red Hat Insights image builder

Creating a “golden image” of an operating system is a common practice when deploying a new system to any environment. It enables you to deploy the same image to all targets. There are usually little setup tasks required immediately after install, though, and it hasn’t always been easy to write those tasks into the image.

That changed when Red Hat Insights image builder added first boot script configuration, allowing you to embed scripts in your image. These scripts run when an instance first starts up. It’s as simple as that, but it makes all the difference.

Read the article

2. Save, edit and share blueprints in Red Hat Insights image builder

In addition to boot scripts, Red Hat Insights image builder also added the blueprints feature, which allows you to create, save and edit revisions of an image over time. A blueprint provides a declarative definition of how to assemble a Red Hat Enterprise Linux image, including software package content and configuration options. This is analogous to a kickstart file available for the RHEL installer image. You can access Insights image builder from the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, but first read the article for a walk-through of the process.

3. Inter-Satellite Sync: Network and Export Sync

An intermittent or slow connection to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can lead to delays, inconsistencies and security risks from missed updates and patches. To address this challenge, Red Hat Satellite’s Inter-Satellite Synchronization (ISS) enables software synchronization for air-gapped and indirectly connected networks, so that software synchronization occurs successfully.

Read the article to learn how to implement this solution for yourself.

4. Explore new datacenter options with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Arm

Every organization needs flexibility in its technology stack. A homogeneous environment is bound to miss out on some edge cases. Fortunately, Arm processors have gained popularity in datacenters due to the processor’s balance between energy efficiency, performance and cost. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Arm delivers a trusted enterprise operating system to Arm-based infrastructure, meaning you can have a consistent operating system across both Arm and x86 servers. You get to choose the most effective and efficient hardware for each workload, while managing everything through a single, standardized toolset.

Read the article to explore your options.

5. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Performance Results on 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors

Intel’s 5th generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Intel Xeon SP) is code-named Emerald Rapids, and is a family of high-end, enterprise-focused processors targeted at a diverse range of workloads. Red Hat and Intel have worked together to deliver state-of-the-art performance to enterprise data centers and beyond. Sure, that sounds impressive and exciting, but wait until you see the benchmark results from SAP when they ran RHEL on a Dell EMC PowerEdge R760. For all the details and a summary of the significant benchmarks, read the article.

6. A deep dive into deploying Red Hat OpenShift on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Efficient deployment and management of containerized applications is a must-have feature for any modern IT team. With the integration of Red Hat OpenShift on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), a powerful and adaptable solution for orchestrating OpenShift clusters on OCI is now at your fingertips. With this combination, you can stop wasting time struggling to deploy and monitor your critical systems, and instead spend time improving processes. Appropriately, this article gets right to the point, and provides a clear overview for how you can deploy OpenShift on OCI using an agent-based installer.

Read the article

7. Customize your Red Hat OpenShift nodes and keep them updated

Back in June 2024, Red Hat revealed a new mechanism for admins to safely and easily customize a specialized operating system deployment without sacrificing the convenience of Red Hat OpenShift. With On-Cluster Layering, you can create a Containerfile with an RPM image that layers customized content (such as device drivers or specialized software) on top of a base operating system image. That means you can still take advantage of hardware acceleration or enhanced security tooling without the burden of manually maintaining both the operating system image and additional software. Your custom images can be updated with each OpenShift upgrade, so device drivers and other customizations get applied automatically.

Read the article

8. Reducing complexity in virtual machine migration and in application platform management

Migrating from a traditional virtualization platform and modernizing your virtualization architecture for continuous innovation and efficiency requires a deliberate approach. You want flexibility and choice, with a proven path to infrastructure and application modernization, and ideally lower total cost of ownership in the end. Red Hat’s open virtualization infrastructure can help VM administrators more quickly and easily rehost existing and new VMs with less risk of business disruption.

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9. Improve your Information Technology Infrastructure Library with automation

An Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a comprehensive framework providing best practices to help an organization effectively manage its IT services. It may seem that with automation and agility, an ITIL is outdated or unnecessary. Eric Lavarde doesn’t think so, though. In this article, Eric argues that automation and an everything-as-code attitude introduce a further shift in ITIL thinking: Changes must be considered and reviewed as they are made to code (or inventory) before the modified code is applied to the environment. But what’s a workflow that can enable this level of scrutiny, while still taking advantage of automation and convenience features built into modern IT solutions? Read the article to find out!

10. Passkey is the future, and the future is now with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

A passkey is a FIDO2-compatible device used for authentication. This is safer and easier than using even a one-time password, and is usually provided as a hardware security token like a small USB or NFC device. RHEL 9.4 introduced the ability for centrally managed users to authenticate with a passkey.

Passwordless authentication is a paradigm shift in authentication that aims to eliminate the need for traditional passwords.Read the article to learn about the benefits of passkey compared to traditional password-based authentication.