Last week Red Hat announced the general availability Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host, its container-optimized version of RHEL 7 based on Project Atomic, which comes with Docker pre-installed and a minimal footprint.
Despite containers are rarely seen in enterprise production environments (if we exclude Google where nearly-everything is non-standard) and most of the developers use them as a lighter version of VMs, Red Hat is investing significantly in this technology, supporting both classic LXC containers and Docker.
Red Hat OpenShift was the first solution to use containers as its foundation and now, with Atomic, Red Hat is going to pervasively support this technology across its entire Open Hybrid Cloud Stack.
The official press release summarizes some of the features introduced by Atomic as follows :
Atomic updating and rollback through an image-like update mechanism. An atomic update can be downloaded and deployed in a single step, while the previous version is retained, allowing for easy atomic rollback, if necessary.
Container images in docker format can be deployed and run as application containers.
Certification and support, along with a chain of trust for containers built using platform images provided by Red Hat, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7 and certified containers from Red Hat’s independent software vendor (ISV) partners.
Container orchestration at scale through Kubernetes, creating large-scale business applications fromdiscrete services deployed in containers across clusters of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host.
Stronger security by default through SELinux, cgroups and kernel namespaces, isolating each container in a multi-container environment.
Support for super-privileged containers enables host management applications to access the host and other containers in a secure manner. This specialized container provides users with the means to install third party software and the atomic command inherent to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host makes creating and running super privileged containers dramatically easier.
Application portability across the open hybrid cloud by leveraging Red Hat’s vast certified ecosystem, enabling secure, stable container deployments on physical hardware, on certified hypervisors including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V, and on certified public cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.