If you work in an enterprise environment, you are probably familiar with Red Hat. What you might not know is that the company just introduced Image Mode, which will serve as a new deployment method for RHEL that delivers the OS as a container image.

Image Mode is a container-native approach for the building, deploying, and managing of the Red Hat operating system and provides a single workflow to manage the entirety of your IT landscape.

The reason image mode has come into being is an AI-centric future. According to Matt Micene, Solution Architect at Red Hat, "...we’ve been exploring AI workloads. AI brings challenges of complicated software stacks and particular hardware support to the forefront of application development."

Micene continues, "And AI workloads are being built in every possible combination of cloud, edge, and on premises. Image mode for RHEL gives us a way to pull all of these worlds together for tight dependency management across the applications and the underlying hardware when building, testing, and deploying AI applications, both through its flexible nature and tight integration with Podman Desktop and Podman AI Lab."

Red Hat believes Image Mode will gain enterprise businesses a complete inventory of standard images and environments, tracking of OS images, simple updates and rollbacks, faster experimentation, and the ability to explore containerized Ci/CD.

Read more about Image Mode on the official Red Hat announcement.