7 tech tips to take Red Hat Enterprise Linux to the edge

Hybrid cloud applications are being deployed, not just within datacenters, but increasingly on remote devices close to where data is created and consumed—this is a domain known as the edge. Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® provides a consistent, flexible, and security-focused foundation that delivers customizable image generation, remote device mirroring, and intelligent rollbacks to maximize the stability of application deployments at the edge.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux edge management helps organizations manage their needs and scale deployments at the edge with added security. 

The benefits of zero-touch provisioning, system health visibility, and quick security remediations are available from a single interface. These capabilities provide control and certainty at every life stage of an edge system.

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Create purpose-built system images using image builder. Build and deploy in less time and more easily maintain system images for your machines outside the datacenter. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux image-based deployments are optimized for edge architectures, but customizable for your specific requirements. Take advantage of the software and life cycle from Red Hat and supplement with your own content and software.

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux allows for image updates to be mirrored and staged transparently in the background, minimizing service interruption.

IT teams can push operating system (OS) updates or application code to production and rely on individual edge devices to stage and apply them at the best time or scheduled maintenance window. This flexibility ensures that updates are applied on your terms to help maximize uptime and reduce administrative effort.

Find out more about automatic updates

Deploy your images through the network or local install media. Besides having a choice of how to install your edge systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports FIDO Device Onboarding (FDO) as a security standard for devices. This allows you to automate post provisioning steps and remotely onboard to management platforms.

Find out more about onboarding

Support edge environments that have low bandwidth, limited or intermittent connectivity. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps administrators with edge systems in difficult-to-reach places to update more efficiently. When updates are deployed, only those blocks that have changed in the image are transferred. This uses less bandwidth and transfers updates in less time.

Learn about updating an image

Run health checks to verify the system, critical services, and applications. 

You are able to define a series of health checks to execute at boot to validate the state of your systems. During an update procedure, if the new system fails it is validation that you can automatically revert to the last known good system state.

Watch and learn more about automating rollbacks 

Podman's auto update capability can detect if an updated container fails and then automatically rollback to the last working version.

Edge images include Red Hat Enterprise Linux container tools. Combining features of the container tools, like automatic container updates and deployments, with existing system capabilities allows you to not only pull and deploy updated containerized workloads as they become available, but also recognize when that update fails to start correctly and redeploy the last version of the application.

Read more about auto-updates