Transition of Red Hat's subscription services to console.redhat.com

Updated -

What is changing?

Red Hat is migrating many of its core customer facing subscription services from access.redhat.com to the Hybrid Cloud Console console.redhat.com. This is being done to unify system and subscription management experiences, regardless of deployment or registration method, by migrating key use cases from Customer Portal RHSM to console.redhat.com. This migration will allow new capabilities such as richer permissions/RBAC tooling to better reflect customer environments, simplification of client registration tooling, and better alignment with cloud-native management tooling.

Additionally Red Hat is transitioning from entitlement based (system-level) subscription management to account level subscription management (Simple Content Access).

Which capabilities are changing, have moved, and are moving to console.redhat.com?

  • Subscription Inventory (Q2/2022) - The Subscription listings at access.redhat.com are now deprecated and are now available at console.redhat.com.
  • Activation Keys (Q3/2022) - Activation keys (which are used to connect systems in lieu of username/password) are available at console.redhat.com, and will include new features such as the ability to set System Purpose attributes. The activation key UI at RHSM is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
  • Manifests
    • Connected Manifests (Q3/2021) - Satellite customers who have Satellites which can reach console.redhat.com can manage their manifests via the UI at console.redhat.com. The new UI allows the creation (and modification) of a subscription manifest, which can then have subscriptions added/removed via the Satellite UI. Additionally, newly created Satellite manifests default to having Simple Content Access enabled.
    • Disconnected Manifests (TBD) - Satellite customers who have Satellites which cannot reach access.redhat.com or console.redhat.com should continue to manage their manifests via Red Hat Subscription Management.
  • Cloud account linkage (formerly known as Cloud Access) (Q2/2021) - Customers who are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the public cloud are advised to use the Hybrid Cloud Your Way workflow on console.redhat.com, The workflows to request gold images via access.redhat.com are deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
  • Default account configuration - As of 15-Jul-2022, newly created Red Hat accounts default to having Simple Content Access enabled.

Which capabilities are being retired

  • Entitlement Management - Entitlement management, effective with the release of Satellite 6.11 (for Satellite customers) and 15-Jul-2022 (for RHSM) is deprecated. Customers are advised to enable Simple Content Access if you haven't already. The ability to operate either Satellite or RHSM in 'entitlement mode' WILL be removed in a future release. Additionally:
    • Requests For Engineering (RFEs) for subscription tooling related to attaching entitlements will be CLOSED-WONTFIX.
    • Requests For Engineering (RFEs) for subscription tooling when operating with SCA enabled will be addressed based on severity & urgency.
    • Bugs related to 'the subscription tools didn't attach the right entitlement' will also be CLOSED-WONTFIX.
    • Bugs related to 'the subscription tools block access to content' will be addressed based on severity & urgency.
    • RFEs and Bugs related to RHSM (the subscription web UI at access.redhat.com) will be CLOSED-WONTFIX
    • RFEs and Bugs related to subscription services at console.redhat.com will be addressed based on severity & urgency.
  • Offline profile creation - Registering 'offline' systems, as documented in https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3121571 is also deprecated. Support for this functionality will be removed from the subscription-manager CLI tooling in the near future and isn't supported at console.redhat.com. Customers who are in disconnected environment are advised to use either Red Hat Satellite or Red Hat Discovery

What is the roadmap/future for Red Hat Subscription Tooling?

Presented at Red Hat Summit 2022 is the following presentation:

RHSM

Additionally, the video below convers some of the modern improvements to the Red Hat subscription experience.

Modernizing the Registration Experience

The Red Hat subscription experience of the future is built on a trifecta of tools with the stated goal of allowing you to "use simply. use obviously."

Simple Content Access

Empower the operator of Red Hat technologies to simply 'register & run' their systems without having to be an expert at Red Hat subscription management.

SCA Makes renewals super simple

When SCA is enabled, you no longer have to attach subscriptions to hosts, and therefore, you do not have to (re) attach subscriptions to hosts post-renewal.

  • If you are a RHSM customer, you have absolutely nothing to do at renewal time. Just renew your subscriptions and keep using the bits. You don't have to reattach subscriptions to hosts; nor do you have to reattach them.
  • If you are a Satellite customer, add the new subs to your manifest and refresh.

Renewals with Red Hat should be like any other renewal: It should keep working with little to no action required on your part. Simple Content Access makes that a practical reality.

Improves registration performance
* Registering systems has been measured to be up to 10x improved when SCA is enabled. This is primarily due to not having the overhead of calculating which entitlement should be attached. An example of the positive performance implications of enabling SCA are described in this document Performance impact of Simple Content Access and Red Hat Satellite. Similar perspective will be seen with large RHSM accounts.

Removes subscription complexity
* Your administrators no longer need to know exactly which subscription, entitlement, or pool-id that is needed to access a certain repository. All that is needed is to register the system, either using subscription-manager or rhc and optionally enable non-default repositories via subscription-manager repos.

Subscription Watch

Empowers the buyer of Red Hat to understand at the fleet level where technology is being used, how much, and if they need to purchase more. Subscription Watch has other more holistic benefits:

Account-level reporting
* Subscription Watch provides reporting across the entirety of a Red Hat account, including connected systems in RHSMs, systems in Satellite, OpenShift clusters, their add-ons and workloads, cloud based systems on Amazon/Azure/Google clouds, and in the near future disconnected systems.

Historical usage data
* Subscription Watch provides historical usage data, which can be useful for reporting and forecasting.

System Purpose

System Purpose is an implementation of use-case attributes, allowing the gathering of data that isn't traditionally fingerprint-able, which connect the two personas together. This allows the operator to tag the systems with the use-case data (which they actually know) and subsequently allows the buyer to filter based upon the use-cases in Subs Watch.

Summary (Read: what do we want you to do?)

Contact us

If you have questions regarding the future of Red Hat's subscription tools, please reach out to your account team. Additionally, you can email the product team directly at smx AT redhat DOT COM

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