How Red Hat can support your journey to a standard operating environment

Standardizing your company’s operating environment starts with the operating system (OS), but it doesn’t end there. As the number of systems grows, configurations drift, maintenance becomes repetitive, and updates can quickly turn into a headache. At Red Hat, we support your standardization journey by providing you with what you need to deliver a robust, coherent, and integrated solution for your standard operating environment.

In this post, I explore the key areas you should take into account along your standardization journey, and how these can be simplified using Red Hat technologies, products, and services.

Consistency across the hybrid cloud

Over time, daily activities on systems can lead to configuration drifts, issues with running workloads and a potential exposure to threats. The best way to start a standardization journey is to have a consistent baseline that your whole infrastructure can rely on, whether it’s on bare metal, hypervisors, or the cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offers two different ways to start building installation images that are hardened, pre-configured with the tools you need, and most of all, that are repeatable over time.

Image builder

Included in RHEL, and also available in the Red Hat Insights service, image builder allows you to define a blueprint of an operating system image. Your image can contain as many customizations as you need, including users, firewall rules, repositories, and which packages to include. You can apply security profiles to harden your image, and much more.

Image builder can generate installation media (such as an ISO, cloud provider image, hypervisor image, and so on) that can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge.

Image mode for RHEL

Based on the open source bootc project, image mode introduces a new way to build and manage RHEL systems at scale. By defining system content in a Containerfile, you get a container image that can be converted into install media (ISO, cloud image, hypervisor image, and so on) and deployed consistently across your infrastructure.

Benefits

There are many benefits when adopting such tools, including:

• Standardized builds: With both image builder and image mode, you create a more trusted, reusable baseline for your servers and applications.
• Reduced drift: Image mode makes use of immutable container images, keeping systems online with greater stability and consistency. Only the /var directory remains persistent across updates.
• Increased security: Standardized, version-controlled, and immutable images help reduce exposure and improve your security posture. The ability to enforce security policies (CIS, PCI-DSS, and so on) during image creation results in hardened and compliant baselines at build time, reducing day 1 and day 2 operations.

Red Hat Identity Management

Identity and access control are crucial for minimizing the attack surface both inside and outside your organization. Permissions need to be both centralized and granular.

Being able to define and enforce rules, policies and manage hosts, services, and users is a huge boost in both systems maintenance and security. This helps reduce configuration sprawl and drifts that could otherwise expose your infrastructure to security threats.

Every RHEL subscription includes Red Hat Identity Management (IdM), a complete solution for centralized identity and access control. It provides:

• Domain controller functions for hosts, services, and identities.
• DNS server capabilities for managing RHEL environments.
• Certificate authority features for issuing, signing, and rotating certificates.
• Implementation of a granular role-based access control (RBAC) to define who can access which systems, and what actions they can perform.
• Multi-factor authentication and passkey support.

For a detailed overview, review this blog post and the IdM product page.

Provisioning, patching, and content management

It’s no secret that when scaling up infrastructure, the number of servers can skyrocket. Keeping their content and configuration consistent with their purpose can become a challenge over time. That’s why RHEL servers can be managed at scale under a single pane of glass by using Red Hat Satellite.

Red Hat Satellite offers a wide range of capabilities, including content management, provisioning, and automation of actions at scale to thousands of hosts. It also serves as a reliable inventory source for reporting and for developing further automation.

Specifically, Red Hat Satellite is ideal when you need to:

• Manage content from multiple sources, such as RPM packages, flatpaks, container images.
• Define and implement content lifecycle management, defining environments and stages, and promoting content among them.
• Interact with bare metal, hypervisors, and cloud providers to provision and manage RHEL servers.
• Leverage direct integration with Red Hat Insights to act as a proxy for your disconnected servers. Red Hat Insights Advisor capabilities can even be used offline as a tech preview feature in Red Hat Satellite 6.17.

Red Hat Insights

Red Hat Insights is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution completely hosted on Red Hat infrastructure. It helps with CVE management and remediation, malware detection, and provides configuration suggestions and advice, and much more.

Automation

When dealing with hundreds or thousands of servers, automation is a must. Automation saves you from having to manually deal with repetitive and potentially error-prone tasks. That’s not all it does, though. A good automation platform also helps you manage secrets, credentials, and organize multiple and complex tasks.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a complete IT automation platform that allows you to easily get started with automating servers at scale. Not only that, it provides a full set of functionalities that can take care of all aspects of automation, including:

• Managing credentials for servers, devices, cloud providers, third-party platforms, or you can create and define your own.
• Creating and managing inventories of devices, either static or dynamically fetched from external services (cloud providers or hypervisors) or fully integrated Red Hat products (such as Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Insights, and so on).
• Organizing automation in templates to automate complex operations and introduce authorization steps to specific tasks.
• Managing authorization with the embedded role-based access control capabilities, to restrict visibility, interaction, and access to the platform.

If you’re creating or reusing content, then the platform also provides mirroring and storing collections, roles, and execution environments directly into the Automation Hub, ideal for disconnected environments or highly regulated scenarios.

Since version 2.4, event-driven automation is available in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. This introduces a new automation paradigm that allows you to capture and respond to events coming from external sources (monitoring systems, cloud services, queues and messaging systems) with direct integration.

Many event sources are already supported out of the box. More is planned for the future and third-party vendors have already published supported versions of event sources. For more information about event-driven automation, read this overview.

Standardize your environment

Standardization isn’t just a matter of choosing a single operating system and hoping that everything will be under control automatically. It requires a whole ecosystem of integrated tools and products to manage all aspects of a system, from its deployment to patching, updates and upgrades, and maintenance.

At Red Hat, we believe there’s a great advantage to having an environment made of fully integrated components that can support every requirement your organization relies on. That’s why we already bring value to our customers in planning and executing their move toward a standard operating environment.
If you’re interested in learning more, contact us today!