Red Hat Adds Automated Container Rollback Capability in RHEL 9

Red Hat today added an automatic container rollback capability to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system along with an image builder service for both creating custom filesystems and configuring virtual machines running on cloud platforms.

The rollback capability is provided via integration with Podman, an open source container management tool that can automatically detect if a newly-updated container fails to start, and which is now embedded in RHEL 9. Announced at the Red Hat Summit 2022 event, Podman integration with RHEL 9 now rolls back a container that fails to start to the previous working version to minimize disruptions to the IT environment.

Podman is capable of managing containers and images, volumes mounted into containers and pods made from groups of containers. It is based on libpod, a library for container life cycle management that surfaces an application programming interface (API). Podman relies on the container runtime that complies with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification to interface with the operating system and create containers that are nearly indistinguishable from those created by another container engine.

RHEL 9 also adds an integrity measurement architecture (IMA), based on digital hashes and signatures, that makes it easier to detect rogue infrastructure modifications along with support for kernel live patching that enables IT operations teams to apply updates across distributed computing environments without having to access command line tooling.

Finally, RHEL 9 adds an expanded set of system roles that automates the workflow associated with creating specific system configurations for deploying a wide range of platforms on top of RHEL.

Siddharth Nagar, director of product management for Red Hat, says the overall goal is to prevent deploying and configuring RHEL from impeding DevOps workflows. By adding these types of capabilities to the operating system, it also becomes simpler to, for example, manage containers such that IT teams rely less on orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes if they so choose. In effect, the line between what container management functions will be handled by platforms such as Kubernetes and which will be handled by operating systems is blurring. In many cases, IT teams are building applications using containers without using any orchestration platform, so integration with Podman provides an alternative approach for IT teams to manage the container environment.

Regardless of the tools employed, as IT environments become more dynamic thanks to the rise of containers, the pace of change is accelerating. Even the most advanced DevOps teams will need to revisit development and deployment processes as the percentage of cloud-native applications running in production environments steadily increases.

In the meantime, the number of container management tools that promise to make it simpler to manage containers embedded into the operating system also is likely to increase. Each IT team will need to decide whether to avail themselves of those tools versus relying on tools that are either embedded in Kubernetes or made available as an add-on. In many cases, IT professionals will simply reach for the free tool that is closest at hand regardless of whether they are a traditional IT administrator or a site reliability engineer (SRE).

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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