The final portion of this lesson takes a high-level look at some of the advantages

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or RHEL) brings to its users.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides organizations with a consistent and stable, yet
flexible platform.

Some of the many benefits RHEL offers users include lifecycle support, a vast
ecosystem of software, hardware, and cloud providers and partners, support from the
Red Hat Product Security team, a documented supply chain, certification and
compliance for a wide variety of industry and governmental standards, and
operational efficiency.

Continue watching for more details about each of these benefits.

When it comes to RHEL, there are two types of releases: major releases and minor
releases.

Each major release of RHEL has a 10-year lifecycle. Starting with RHEL 8, Red Hat
delivers a major release every three years. In major releases, there can be
significant content changes in the product.

Minor releases are delivered approximately every six months. Minor releases include
incremental changes such as bug fixes, new hardware enablement, new features, and
security updates.

Red Hat has relationships with thousands of software, hardware, and cloud partners,
so organizations can typically deploy knowing that the technology in their
environment works with RHEL.

Users of RHEL benefit from the work of the Red Hat Product Security team. This team
spends countless hours delving into Red Hat products (including RHEL) to address
security issues, compliance certifications, and other aspects
related to security. Red Hat Product Security protects customers by empowering Red
Hat to design, build, and operate trustworthy solutions, while engaging in open
source ecosystems.

Red Hat Product Security accomplishes this by:

Helping customers to attain critical certifications

Driving continuous security improvements in Red Hat's productization pipelines and

working to ensure the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of Red Hat's
products and services.

Supporting Red Hat Global Engineering with clear, open, and efficient secure
development and vulnerability management practices

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is developed with a documented supply chain, is compliant
with government and commercial security standards, and receives security patches
often within 24 hours of a critical vulnerability being made public.

Red Hat takes in source code from numerous carefully selected projects, and reviews
and hardens it. The software is delivered to customers in cryptographically signed
packages through an encrypted Content Delivery Network (or CDN).

Red Hat continuously invests money and resources to ensure RHEL meets compliance
standards to help users certify on a variety of standards required by industries
and governments, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
(or HIPAA) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (or PCI DSS).
With RHEL, organizations can improve their operational efficiency by using Red Hat
Insights, a service included with all RHEL systems.

Insights analyzes data from systems and uses Red Hat's deep domain expertise to
identify security, configuration, or system performance risks.

Focusing on areas of operations, security, and business, Insights provides

administrators and stakeholders with on-demand data about their system population
that can help them address issues that may cause them downtime, application
performance issues, or security
vulnerabilities.

Insights helps teams stay ahead of critical operational issues and frees up
resources. This operational efficiency means that teams spend
less time and effort maintaining or troubleshooting RHEL and can instead spend that
time on needs critical to their organization.

Congratulations! You have completed the first lesson in this course. Review the key
takeaways and answer the knowledge check questions before moving on to Lesson 2.

What is Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (commonly known as RHEL) is an enterprise-grade Linux

distribution.

RHEL provides a stable platform for workloads and applications suitable for
organizations reliant upon standards compliance, support, security, and operational
efficiency.

In addition to supporting numerous independent software vendors (or ISVs),

independent hardware vendors (or IHVs), cloud providers, and partners, as well as
open source packages, RHEL includes software development libraries and tools that
allow customers to write their own software in a variety of programming languages.

RHEL is used on servers, edge devices, and workstations within enterprises,

government entities, educational institutions, and other organizations.

RHEL is used in many different capacities. It is used for crunching data for
geological exploration, biomedical research (for data analysis), and various other
supercomputer workloads. It is also deployed in railyards and on trains to prevent
collisions. RHEL is used on cruise ships, and with national defense
assets. It is used by companies for electronic commerce, high-frequency stock
trading, website content, mail servers, file sharing services, network management,
IP telephony systems, point-of-sale systems, and much more.

RHEL is built from open source innovation and community and partner collaboration.
Development, testing, and other tasks are completed by both Red Hat and its
partners. Subsequently, keeping with Red Hat's open source strategy, features and
code are fed back to the communities who manage the constituent projects; Red Hat
contributes significantly back to open source projects.

Red Hat creates software by using the open source way, an open forum for ideas
where communities can form around solving a problem or developing a new technology.

It starts with community-created open source software, and then Red Hat builds upon
each project to harden security, fix bugs, patch vulnerabilities, and add new
features. Red Hat then contributes these improvements back to each project so the
entire open source community can benefit.

Red Hat works alongside community members, customers, and even competitors in
thousands of upstream projects to help integrate the best features and bug fixes
into the Fedora Linux distribution.

From there, select content is curated and flows into CentOS Stream, which is the
code that will become the next version of RHEL.

CentOS Stream is freely available to the public, allowing individuals and

organizations to collaborate with enhancements and fixes or even to fork, innovate,
and compete with Red Hat.

This process leads to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, an enterprise-grade operating

system with stabilized open source features.

Pause the video and take a moment to review the path to RHEL. When you are ready,
press play to resume the video.

Continue to the next topic: Advantages of RHEL

What is Linux?

Linux is an open source operating system.

It is released under the GNU General Public License, or GPL, which means when
someone obtains a copy of Linux, they are entitled to have access to the source
code used to make it.

That access to the source code allows someone to see, modify, and rebuild the code
as they see fit.

Linux is the largest open source software project in the world. Numerous groups and
companies create their own distinct
implementations of Linux. These are referred to as distributions.

Linux runs on a wide variety of hardware, ranging from phones to edge devices, and
servers to supercomputers and mainframes. It can also run in a virtual machine or
in the cloud.

Every Linux-based distribution includes a Linux kernel, which manages the system's
resources, and a set of additional software that provides all sorts of components
for users and applications to interact with.

For example, that web browser application referred to in the previous topic, or
even the graphical user interface that is employed by users to interact with
applications and system content.

The Linux-based distribution includes the Linux kernel at its core, but then adds a
variety of software, including programming languages, software development tools,
graphical user interface, server applications such as file server, web server, and
database server
applications, as well as utilities for configuring and managing the system.

Because Linux distributions are based on open source software, combinations of

exactly what software is included in a distribution can vary, but they all include
the Linux kernel as their core component.
For purposes of this course, consider the following two broad types of Linux
distributions:

Community distributions, which are assembled and delivered by open source projects
and are free to download and use

and

Enterprise distributions, which are built, tested, distributed, and maintained by

commercial entities that charge fees for access to the binaries, updates, and
patches, and provide technical and operational support.

Pause the video and take a moment to review the characteristics of enterprise
distributions as opposed to those of community distributions.

When you are ready, press play to resume the video.

An example of an enterprise distribution is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or RHEL).

Continue to the next topic: What is RHEL?

What is an operating system?

An operating system, or OS, is software that interacts with hardware on a computer

while also providing a standardized interface for applications to perform tasks.
This critical layer of computing allows for an application
to perform tasks such as getting data from the network, or accessing files while
the operating system handles details like how to manage traffic to or from the
specific model of network card, or how to handle writing or retrieving data from
the specific type of storage devices included in the computer.

The operating system sits between applications and hardware and makes the
connections between software and the physical resources that do the work.

Examples of operating systems include Mac OS, Windows, and a variety of types of
Linux.

Examples of hardware include not only disk drives and network adapters, but also
items such as keyboards, mice, memory and displays.

Consider a user who opens a web browser and views something on the internet. That
simple task uses the computer's graphics card
and display so the user can view the content.

The computer's network interface was used to transmit and receive the content. The
computer's central processing unit, or CPU, was
used to organize the network data as well as to render that data into viewable
graphics and fonts, and perform formatting of the page. And there were many other
small things the web browser did to make that page viewable for the user. All of
these tasks and the system's resources used by the browser were coordinated, and
operated, by the operating system of the computer running the web
browser.

Without the operating system, the application developer would have to write code
for each of these low-level tasks to be performed by the application.

Thanks to the operating system, application developers have standard methods of

interacting with the system's resources and other programs running on the computer,
which means the developer who wrote that web browser did not have to provide
drivers for network cards,
instructions for CPU scheduling, graphics card drivers, their own networking stack,
and thousands of other things their application leveraged; they could focus on
developing their web browser software.

Continue to the next topic: What is Linux?