It has been three and half years since Red Hat last issued a major new version number of its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform. A lot has happened since RHEL 7 was launched in June 2014 and Red Hat is now previewing its next generation RHEL 8 platform in beta.
Among the biggest changes in the last four years across the compute landscape has been the emergence of containers and microservices as being a primary paradigm for application deployment. In RHEL 8, Red Hat is including multiple container tools that it has been developing and proving out in the open-source community including Buildah (container building), Podman (running containers) and Skopeo (sharing/finding containers).