More than meets the eye: Behind the scenes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (Part 2)

This series takes a look at the people and planning that went into building and releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. From the earliest conceptual stages to the launch at Red Hat Summit 2025, we’ll hear firsthand accounts of how RHEL 10 came into being.

Part 1

In our first post looking behind the scenes of how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 came to be. We heard about the early stages that started right after Summit 2022 and the release of RHEL 9. This included assembling the team, setting expectations, and working with upstream communities to gather ideas. In part 2, the team behind RHEL 10 shares how a new approach to building the platform came into focus and implementation.

2023 (2 years until RHEL 10 launch)

Brian Stinson, principal software engineer

The first bit that we start with is Fedora. And that gives us the content set and problem space to look at. And then the things that we need to drive, that will happen continuously.

Stef Walter, Senior Director, Engineering

Part of what we did was have CentOS Stream be the place where we do RHEL development. A lot of it comes from Fedora, but then a lot of the iteration—constantly having a build, multiple times a day of all of RHEL—is in CentOS Stream. 

Stinson

The main advantage we got out of doing [CentOS Stream] was we were basically doing the build in public, and it actually helped us quite a bit just keeping some of that engagement.

Walter

And this is also a place where, although we are firmly in control of what goes into RHEL, we are open for other people to suggest a change or contribution.

Stinson

It’s nice to be able to give signals like that outside of the company. [One of the] things that we want to be able to do in a major release is make really big changes. But at the same time we don’t want people to be surprised whenever we drop a release. That shouldn’t be the first time that they have a chance to see what’s coming.

Mike McGrath, vice president, Core Platforms Engineering

For an organization as big as the RHEL team, this is where it’s really important to have good direction and really strong leaders within your ranks. Because if every decision and every technology point had to come to me or required my direction or it wouldn’t get done, and RHEL would grind to a halt.

Shelley Dunne, senior principal program manager

It’s along the lines of how the RHEL program is changing. They’re pursuing more agile alignment, and so that’s pushing decision-making closer to the people who need to be making the decisions.

McGrath

Every week the team gets together and talks about what’s working, what’s not. One of the values at Red Hat is accountability. If we in engineering said we’re going to get something done on time, and it’s not done on time, that program call is where we’re accountable for it. That sort of culture of accountability is critical with a large group like this because with accountability major mistakes become manageable. Without that accountability, anything could happen.

Stinson
It’s a little bit of a circus, and I mean that in the best possible way. Everybody’s got their own pockets of activity. Everybody gets to play a little bit of a part in putting it all together.

So now, two years out from launch, workflows are developed and launched, and iterations begin in public with CentOS Stream. As the time to launch ticks down, the team now has to be able to maintain the concert hall of spinning plates that forms the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.