Beyond modularity and other upgrades: The game-changer for your IT planning

Beyond modularity and other upgrades: The game-changer for your IT planning What does "removal of support for modularity" mean? Why should a 3-year-early feature announcement even matter? What is the digital roadmap? Where is Red Hat Lightspeed planning headed? Planning a RHEL future with confidence? Red Hat Enterprise Linux | Product trial About the authors Scott McCarty (fatherlinux) Rebecca Combs More like this More than meets the eye: Behind the scenes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (Part 4) Looking ahead to 2026: Red Hat’s view across the hybrid cloud OS Wars_part 1 | Command Line Heroes OS Wars_part 2: Rise of Linux | Command Line Heroes Keep exploring Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share Scott and I talk to a lot of customers, and one theme that comes up over and over is that it’s difficult to plan for future releases of Linux. Sometimes, support drops for a feature or capability on which they rely. Other times, it’s that they can’t wait for a new feature, bug fix, and so on. Planning for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with its built-in digital roadmap, powered by Red Hat Lightspeed, is changing that. Product managers within RHEL now communicate directly with you about upcoming changes in the code base. This gives you more time to plan for changes, as well as clearer information about what’s changing. This simplifies upgrades and helps inform the automation your teams are building for the platform. Executing on this vision, we are eager to announce our first planned change to the next major version of RHEL: Removal of support for modularity in RHEL 11! This update excites RHEL product managers, who work tirelessly to keep feature roadmaps perfectly updated for customers, partners, and Red Hat engineers alike, but many readers may find this a curious announcement. Read on to better understand why it's so exciting. Since the launch of RHEL in 2002, there has been an ongoing challenge to enable the multitude of developer applications, languages, and tools, as well as their differing versions function seamlessly together on a stable, enterprise-grade operating system. Initial workarounds include providing one-version-only support at each major OS release, or in 2013 introducing Red Hat Software Collections to allow for newer versioned applications to be installed in isolated directories. Given a developer's need for modern software versions before a major OS upgrade, on top of the tediousness of hard-isolating every newly updated application, a core versioning strategy was needed for RHEL to succeed.