Managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the edge

Are your edge computing systems secure? A simple question with a potentially complicated answer. This is because many engineering teams combine Red Hat Enterprise Linux with decoupled applications thanks to containerization technologies. But with so many changes happening across your organization, it can be hard to scale your infrastructure. Managing the lifecycle of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux with edge management to make it easy to standardize, deploy and enhance security posture throughout the system’s lifecycle. This post takes an in-depth look at edge management from this perspective.

Standardized images

Creating a standard operating environment is key to scaling—without standardization, it becomes exponentially difficult to understand and manage your security composure. So we enable you to create images that can be customized to include any software you wish, both from Red Hat and third-party vendors, as well as configuration details, like a username and ssh public key. Once built, your image can be automatically deployed to your edge computing systems, which means bit for bit, byte for byte, the operating system is identical across your fleet.

Zero-touch onboarding

As you deploy your standardized image across your environments, from development to production, you’re going to want to register these systems back to the edge management console. Just bake in your activation key and organization ID into the ISO, and every time you deploy a new system it will be registered back, giving you the visibility and lifecycle management capabilities you need to build a stronger security profile and stay more up-to-date.

Grouping and filtering

We know you don’t think about your systems as a single entity—they’re probably part of a larger fleet— so we give you the tools and flexibility to map your systems however you like. This is foundational to any good lifecycle management platform, and core to effecting change across your fleet. More often than not, changes are made across a fleet or group, mitigating risk with progressive changes, or reliable rollback capabilities. So we make it possible for you to group your systems and refine your views in a way that works best for you.

Identifying vulnerability with Red Hat Insights

Systems out in the wild have greater security requirements—gone are the days when you could deploy remote computing systems and forget about them until they break. In today’s ever-connected world, system security is a top priority. We use the power of Red Hat Insights to provide vulnerability analysis and system security recommendations, so you’ll have a better real-time understanding of risk.

Generating and deploying updates

Understanding risk on its own is not enough—you also need to remediate or mitigate known risks by generating and deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux capabilities for edge updates. New updates can add or remove packages, or update the versions of already installed packages. When you’ve created an update, you can just as easily generate static deltas and push the update to a single system or a group in a way that’s better for intermittently connected or high latency connections. And if there’s a problem, updates can be automatically rolled back to a known good state.

Someone said I should stop here!

Seriously, I could carry on until I’m blue in the face. But my favorite thing about all of this; it’s available as-a-service. Easy to use and consume without any prerequisites, just log in and get started. What better way to learn more? Try the demo environment, then login and get started for yourself.

Sean O’Keeffe is a Principal Product Manager at Red Hat, focusing on the management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Having previously worked in small and large technology organizations, he now creates products that solve problems for the technology organizations of today.

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