Red Hat announced that RHEL 8.4 is generally available to customers. The latest release introduces various features for hybrid cloud, edge deployments, and enhancements for operators, developers, and organizations standardized on RHEL.
Container Tools 3.0
RHEL 8.4 includes Container Tools 3.0 AppStream. It contains newer versions of Podman, Buildah, Skopeo, and runc. Podman now has support in RHEL for auto-updating container images, which allows Podman to poll to see if containers have been updated and pull new images, and use systemd to restart them.
RHEL 8.4 also includes Red Hat Universal Base Image micro image, which is the smallest UBI offering that omits package management from the image itself but can rely on a package manager on the underlying RHEL host to install packages. The Red Hat team also introduced new AppStreams, including Python 3.9, Redis 6, PostgreSQL 13, MariaDB 10.5 as well as GCC 10, LLVM 11, Rust 1.49, and Go 1.15.7.
RHEL 8.4 also simplifies updates, provides additional options for installing to disconnected systems and adds the ability to use OSTree repositories with OCI container images. Red Hat also simplifies its Cloud Access program with the release, making it easier to consume content when deploying cloud-based systems and manage them.