Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution that targets its products primarily for businesses.
After quite a hectic week for Red Hat due to its recent changes to RHEL code access, which was translated for a large part of the community as "bad news." Red Hat has recently released some news "positive" so to speak.
One of them is the recent announcement of the «expansion of paid extended support service» (ELS, Extended Life Cycle Support), which releases updates to address critical issues after the end of the base 10-year maintenance cycle.
As we approach the end of the standard 10-year lifecycle for RHEL 7, some IT organizations are finding that they cannot complete their planned migrations before June 30, 2024. To help IT teams as they get up to speed With its migration schedules, Red Hat announces a single 4-year ELS maintenance period for RHEL 7 ELS. While Red Hat provides more time, we strongly encourage customers to migrate to a newer version of RHEL to take advantage of new features and enhancements.
Through a blog announcement, Red Hat has announced that for the RHEL 7 branch, support was extended to four more yearsThus, for RHEL 7, the possible maintenance period will be 14 years. (In earlier versions of the distribution such as RHEL 6, ELS was supported for three years.)
Based on the regular 10-year support cycle, RHEL 9 will be supported until May 31, 2032, RHEL 8 until May 31, 2029 and RHEL 7 until June 30, 2024. Support for CentOS Stream 8 will continue until May 31, 2024 and for CentOS Stream 9 until May 31, 2027 (5 years later). from RHEL 8 and 9).
All major releases of RHEL follow a standard 10-year lifecycle. For the first 5 years, we provide full support, including bug fixes, security patches, software enhancements, hardware enablement, and backports. For the next 5 years, we provide maintenance support with security patches and bug fixes being released as needed.
With this change, RHEL 7 becomes one of the longest-supported distributions on the market, since for example for other distributions, a 10-year maintenance period is provided on SUSE Linux and Ubuntu distributions (5 years + 5 years of extended security maintenance). Debian GNU/Linux is supported for 5 years under the Extended LTS support program (plus, optionally, two more years under the "Extended LTS" initiative).
Another piece of news recently released by Red Hat is the partnership with nokia with which it is intended provide high-quality network services. Service providers thus benefit from the combination of Nokia's market-leading network software and the deployment power of Red Hat solutions.
With this new partnership, Nokia will use Red Hat infrastructure platforms "to enable faster development and testing of Nokia's core network portfolio."
Nokia will continue to support its customers directly, but Red Hat will provide Nokia with ongoing development, services and support for Nokia NCS and CBIS.
It is mentioned that the reason for the association was that
“As service providers explore the opportunities with 5G, including core network, open RAN, multi-access edge computing (MEC), application modernization, and more, they require greater flexibility and options for deploying applications. and services in the infrastructure and location of your choice.
“This means that integration and interoperability across the ecosystem is critical.” In addition to the changes described above, Nokia will certify Nokia's Cloud Native Network Functions (CNFs) for the core network and Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Nokia emphasized that if, in the future, a customer wants to buy any Nokia software covered by this agreement, they will have to use Red Hat.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link