Introducing Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Microsoft Azure

Red Hat is pleased to announce the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Microsoft Azure (RHEL for Azure). You can run a fully optimized version of RHEL 10 or RHEL 9.6 that's deeply integrated with Azure, and pre-configured for performance with Azure-specific profiles.

Red Hat and Microsoft have a long history of collaborating on the delivery of new features and capabilities. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Azure builds on that history by providing the foundation for taking your RHEL in Azure workloads to the next level and beyond. 

Optimized for Azure 

Red Hat and Microsoft have worked closely over the past 10 years to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux available in Azure marketplaces. Together, Red Hat and Microsoft have brought forward the same reliability, availability and security you depend on, in on-premise RHEL deployments to Azure.

RHEL for Azure expands on these capabilities by optimizing the configuration, deployment, and performance of RHEL for Azure instances. RHEL for Azure tuned profiles are designed to ensure optimal performance for your workloads. The included Microsoft Azure Network Adapter (MANA) drivers provide higher throughput and reliability for your RHEL for an Azure virtual machine (VM). Administrators can collect, analyze, and visualize performance and diagnostic data using Azure Monitor.

RHEL for Azure provides a premiere Linux platform to run, monitor and adjust to your Azure workloads—today, tomorrow and beyond.

Security from the ground up

RHEL has a strong reputation for providing advanced security capabilities  through features like SELinux, system-wide crypto policies, and Network Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE). While encryption protects data at rest or data in transit, Confidential Computing protects the confidentiality of data in use on virtual machines, workloads, containers, clusters, and hypervisors. Confidential Computing is a core technology standard, and it's integrated into mainstream processors from AMD, Intel, IBM. It's also available for upcoming Azure ARM architectures.

Secure Boot (a part of the UEFI specification) is the established standard for boot time verification of VMs. This is available in RHEL for Azure from the Trusted launch virtual machines option, configured during the deployment of RHEL for Azure VMs from the Azure portal: 

Select Enable secure boot in the Security CVM, and you're ready to go.

RHEL for Azure 10 and 9.6 expand on these capabilities with the official GA of Confidential Virtual Machines (CVM). CVM ensures that customer workloads and the data within are isolated from the underlying infrastructure in use. No matter where a RHEL for Azure CVM instance is running, the integrity of the data in use within it remains protected from the outside environment. 

CVM also supports confidential OS disk encryption to ensure that your VM is protected from the underlying hosting platform. By enabling confidential OS disk encryption, your CVM  instance (not the host infrastructure) manages the encryption and ensures your RHEL for Azure VM data remains protected both at rest and in use.

Confidential OS disk encryption can be enabled on your RHEL for Azure CVM hosts from the Azure portal:

RHEL for Azure virtual machines enabled with Secure Boot, CVM, and Trusted Launch offers a robust, powerful set of capabilities for your Azure security requirements.

Introducing Image Mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Image Mode introduces an exciting new approach that delivers Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a single, bootable container image. This method streamlines deployment, simplifies administration and brings new levels of consistency and resiliency to managing your RHEL workloads and applications.

What’s different?

Packages are the standard approach to managing and distributing RHEL software. Packages simplify the management of your software components and dependencies. Continue using them just as you always have or use Image Mode.

Image Mode uses the same packages, but delivers Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a single, bootable (bootc) container image that can be managed with standard container-native tooling and registries. For example:

FROM registry.redhat.io/rhel10/rhel-bootc:10.0
RUN dnf install -y [software + dependencies] && dnf clean all
ADD [application]
ADD [configuration]
RUN [config scripts]

Accelerate delivery

Combining the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system with the same tools and workflows as your applications decreases development times, simplifies content  management and allows you to meet customer requirements faster.

Contain drift

Configuration drift occurs naturally as IT environments respond to the ever-changing requirements of applications and workloads. As hardware and software components are added, removed or updated, the supporting configurations can change and become out of sync. Image Mode contains that drift by using ready to run RHEL images, built and maintained by Red Hat. Applying updates from a central repository ensures consistency and reliability across all of your images. 

Image rollbacks

Image Mode limits the risks associated with updates by providing image rollback capabilities allowing you to recover quickly and easily without impacting your package management stack.

Integration

DevOps integrates development and IT operations into a comprehensive set of practices to streamline software testing, deployment and maintenance. Image Mode in combination with Azure DevOps provides the ideal platform for automating, managing and deploying RHEL images in Azure.

Bring RHEL into Azure

There has never been a more exciting time for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat-Microsoft partnership. Red Hat and Microsoft continue to bring the best capabilities in RHEL forward, to adapt to meet the ever changing challenges faced by our customers in Azure. RHEL for Azure represents the next step in that journey.