More than meets the eye: Behind the scenes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

This series takes a look at the people and planning that went into building and releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. From the earliest conceptual stages to the launch at Red Hat Summit 2025, we’ll hear firsthand accounts of how RHEL 10 came into being.

At Red Hat Summit 2025, we announced the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10. This release was much more than a few minor enhancements or feature additions; RHEL 10 delivers AI-powered Linux management, post-quantum cryptography capabilities and containers as the native language of the operating system.

In short, RHEL 10 is a major sea change in how enterprise Linux platforms function. This means it didn’t just happen overnight.

More than 1,000 Red Hatters across engineering, marketing, product management, QE, and more collaborated to make the singular moment of this launch happen. For these individuals and teams, however, it wasn’t one event - it was the culmination of hundreds of moments and milestones.

So let’s take a look at some of those moments through the lens of those actually building RHEL 10.

2022 (right after RHEL 9 releases)

Major RHEL releases - such as 8, 9 and 10 - occur every three years. This means that the launch at Red Hat Summit 2025 actually started right after Red Hat Summit 2022, when RHEL 9 became reality.

Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

“Work on RHEL never stops. Major releases are a once-every-three-year opportunity to make disruptive, evolutionary changes that simply wouldn’t work or be acceptable in a minor release.”

Mike McGrath, vice president, Core Platforms Engineering

“We’ve got architects and product owners and software engineers and software QE engineers that all come together to make this gigantic thing work. And the key thing there is to remember, at that program level, you’ve got to make sure everyone comes in as equals and that they all understand what we’re doing, where we’re going, and when so that we can all get there at the same time.

With a big release like RHEL, the vast majority of people involved are engineers. So you set up a program with a program manager, and ours is Shelley Dunne. This was Shelley’s first release with RHEL and we were VERY glad to have her on it.”

Shelley Dunne, senior principal program manager

“We’re in this together. We need to be constantly asking if a given capability, feature or change is the right thing to do for the product. If it is, let’s go figure out who needs to do what and get it done.”

McGrath

“Then we start picking who’s going to lead parts of this. Brian Stinson was our main architect for RHEL 10, and we involved him early because of how the Fedora community factors into RHEL releases. Fedora releases every six months and is far, far ahead of RHEL - but if we know where RHEL is going to be, we need to get there in Fedora first.”

Brian Stinson, principal software engineer

“We wanted to be well-integrated into the Fedora community to help make sure the future of RHEL is represented in Fedora releases. It’s cheaper in dollars, it’s cheaper in maintainer effort, it’s cheaper in cognitive load to do something in Fedora and then inherit it, rather than try and fork it off later. So influencing features and capabilities in Fedora really early—that’s something that we’re really intentional about, for both the betterment of Fedora and for Red Hat’s customers.

But we also want to make sure that we’re influencing and adapting Fedora at the right point, because we need to make sure that the features we want in RHEL are in Fedora when we’re ready for productization.”

McGrath

“In those early days, for the first 18 months of that release, sometimes great stuff comes in and spawns new ideas in us, and sometimes we’re driving those ideas. But all of it happens there in the community space where we get feedback, whether we want it or not, and that really helps us hone in on new technology stacks.”

Dunne

“Let’s get ideas out there. Let’s see what’s out there. Let’s talk about what we’re hearing from customers. Let’s talk about what we’re hearing from partners.

Given the nature of our technology and our business, things happen with short turnaround. So if you’re talking about something in 2025 for RHEL 11 that’s 3 years away, the world can change before we get there.”

Scott McCarty, senior principal product manager - technical, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

“So we kicked it off 36 months before Red Hat Summit. We knew we were going to launch at this Summit. It felt so far away. It was not.”

Hellekson

”Everyone is giddy with possibility because the plan is unconstrained by the grim realities of time and calories. Everything is possible!”

But this is only the start of the many, many, MANY moments that went into building RHEL 10. In our next post, we’ll see how the new ways of developing RHEL, fully in the open as part of CentOS Stream, helped shape the platform’s future.