The world’s favourite grown-up headgear-themed Linux distro, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has reached version 8.3, Red Hat has announced. Identical in most respects to 8.2, the new version adds pre-packaged configuration, compliance and container options to ease the daily toil of devops in the modern IT environment.

There are new Red Hat System Roles, which guide and automate OS configurations to speed installation by what RH charitably describes as those with ‘a wider range of skill sets’. New roles now include kernel settings, log settings, SAP HANA, SAP NetWeaver and management.Tuned, a set of pre-configured, architecture-aware performance profiles, has also been updated.

Next on the list of hat stylings are new Secure Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) profiles for the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark and the American Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). These ease compliance fears across the organisation, giving upper management in particular great comfort,

Security System Roles now include identity management configuration, certificate management and Network-Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE), again offering the promise of set-and-forget options for complex configurations.

Application Streams, which parcel up developer frameworks, databases, container tools and other resources, now include Node.js 14, Ruby 2.7 and many others, without ditching earlier versions. There are also updated container images for Buildah and Skopeo, and Podman 2.0 is also included, bringing a new REST API to gerner components with granularity from the Docker Container Engine.

All these treats will be made available ‘in the coming weeks’ through the usual channels, promises Red Hat.