Yes, Red Hat's forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.9 will come with stability and security improvements. That's not the real news. The big story is it supports the next generation of cloud-native applications through an updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 base image.

I've said it before. I'll say it again. Red Hat's foundation is Linux, but its future is in the cloud. This beta release is one more example of Red Hat's vision for tomorrow.

Starting with this beta, developers and operators can start moving RHEL 6 workloads into container-based applications. These can then be deployed on RHEL 7, RHEL Atomic Host, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

RHEL 6.9 also has other significant improvements.

This new version of RHEL supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2. This gives RHEL 6.9 complete support for TLS 1.2 in the shipped security libraries. TLS 1.2 is recommended by modern security standards. Simultaneously, insecure cryptographic protocols and algorithms, such as MD5, SHA0, RC4, or 512-bit DH, have been deprecated. For this reason alone, you'll want to upgrade to RHEL 6.9 as soon as possible.

The new RHEL also comes with improved support via Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Access Labs. Between the two you can fix both known problems that may be hiding in your servers and improve performance, and more quickly deploy and configure complex applications.

RHEL 6.9 beta is now available to all customers with an active RHEL subscription.

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