RHEL

RHEL, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is a commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat, designed for enterprise servers, workstations, and cloud environments. It emphasizes stability, security, and long-term support, and is built from open-source components with development tied to the Fedora project and upstream kernel. RHEL is distributed under a paid subscription that provides access to official binaries, updates, and technical support, making it a common choice for data centers and enterprise deployments.

RHEL originated in 2003 as a commercially supported successor to earlier Red Hat Linux. The distribution established a formal lifecycle with long maintenance periods and certified hardware compatibility. In the 2010s Red Hat aligned with the CentOS project, initially as a downstream rebuild and later introducing CentOS Stream as an upstream development track. IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019, reinforcing RHEL’s role in enterprise computing. Major releases include RHEL 6, 7, 8, and 9, each focusing on stability, security, and enterprise readiness.

Key features include the DNF package manager, support for modules and AppStreams to provide multiple software versions within a single release, and robust security tooling such as SELinux. RHEL also emphasizes automation and lifecycle management through tools like Ansible, Satellite, and Insights. Virtualization and container capabilities are built in, with tools such as Podman, Buildah, and Skopeo. Certification and support extend to hardware platforms, cloud environments, and a wide range of software stacks.

Licensing and distribution: access is via subscriptions with various support levels, and there is a free developer subscription for non-production use. RHEL runs on x86_64 and other architectures including IBM Power, s390x, and ARM64, and is available on-premises or through public cloud providers.