How are container orchestration tools supported with Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to be the enterprise distribution that is trusted across physical, virtual, and container deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host provide a stable, secure, and performance enhanced experience that our user base relies on for container deployments, irrespective of the container orchestration tools a customer may elect to use. Currently, two orchestration technologies are available in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Extras repository, both of which have limited support with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. This article covers the explicit support statements and covered use cases for container orchestration included with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription.

Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform

OpenShift Container Platform is Red Hat’s fully supported distribution of Kubernetes. The platform is built on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OCI technologies including Docker, Kubernetes, and more to provide a complete end-to-end, supported platform for containerized workloads. This is our supported path for running containerized workloads in a production capacity.

Support in Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Support for container orchestration as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes support for the packaging, installation, and limited configuration of the container orchestration that is built, tested and distributed by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes full support for the container runtime, along with the ability to build, test and deploy multi-container applications using the following guidelines.

Kubernetes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux "Extras" Channel

As of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, the Kubernetes packages shipped in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extras channel are deprecated, and Red Hat no longer supports the manual installation and configuration of Kubernetes on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. OpenShift Container Platform is Red Hat’s fully supported distribution of Kubernetes.

Embedded swarm in docker

The docker container runtime, as of version 1.12, embeds swarm as part of the docker package. Swarm is an extension of the docker API that provides basic orchestration. As of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, Red Hat no longer supports the usage of the swarm for container orchestration.