Dan's Take

Red Hat Releases Fedora 25

A large number of use cases are supported.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 11/28/2016

Red Hat recently released Fedora 25, which can be the foundation for physical, virtual and cloud computing projects. Here's what the company has to say about this release:

As with previous releases, Fedora 25 comprises a set of base packages that form the foundation of Fedora’s three distinct editions: Fedora 25 Workstation, Fedora 25 Server and, replacing Fedora Cloud, Fedora 25 Atomic Host.

If we look a bit closer at this release, we see that it includes a number of packages that can support a large number of use cases, including the following:

• Docker 1.12, for building and running containerized applications
• Node.js 6.5, the latest version of the popular server-side JavaScript engine
• Multiple Python versions (2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5) to help test across multiple Python configurations
• Support for Rust, a programming language that aims to make development faster and more stable

Fedora 25 Workstation
This package is designed to support developers and Linux desktop users. It's also is designed to help Windows and macOS users feel more comfortable working within a Linux environment.

Fedora 25 Server
This package is designed to support multiple roles, including development and application delivery.

Fedora 25 Atomic Host (Formerly Fedora Cloud)
Fedora 25 Atomic Host is designed to support Linux within a virtual machine VM or on a physical host. The company states that it intends to refresh this software every two weeks to keep up with the rapidly changing world of Linux containers.

Dan's Take: A Hatful of Virtualization
My first take is that Red Hat Fedora includes quite a number of types of virtualization technology that includes nearly all of the main categories in the Kusnetzky Group model. This clearly demonstrates that virtualization has become "the wiring in the wall," and has become the foundation for most types of computing being supported on Fedora. When thinking about Fedora 25 and its competitors, I can't help but go back in my mind to the early days of Linux. Back in the 1993-1994 timeframe, my systems software research team at IDC was following more than 300 different distributions of Linux.

With the exception of a few major players such as Red Hat and SUSE, most of these distributions were developed to support students at a specific university, researchers at a specific lab, or the needs of a large association.

These groups were willing to take on the engineering tasks associated with creating and fielding a Linux distribution because it would support specificially, exactly and only what the organization was doing. Often these organizations were blessed with many software engineers and were seeking  "no cost per user" operating environment software.

Red Hat Fedora, like its competitors OpenSUSE and Canonical's community supported versions of Ubuntu, took up the mission served by that early multitude of Linux distributions: they made it easily possible for those proficient in Linux development and support to have access to a modern, up-to-date version of the technology without also taking on the huge task of gathering together the results of an ever-growing number of open source projects. After all, isn't it better to download something pre-assembled and tested by a supplier such as Red Hat?

If your organization hasn't committed to a specific Linux supplier or is looking for a little-to-no cost Linux distribution, Red Hat Fedora is worthy of your consideration.