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?