Welcome to the world of enterprise-level Linux version 7. This was first introduced to us on June 9, 2014. Red Hat started its journey with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 with its beta release on December 11, 2013. This was followed by the next release candidate on April 23. Finally, as expected, the gold release reached the market on June 2014. Currently, at the time of writing this book, we have Update 1 in the beta release. During the course of this book, this is what we will use for demonstration purposes.

This chapter will help you understand why enterprise-level Linux differs from other bleeding edge distributions. It will also help you understand the relationship between Red Hat, CentOS, and Fedora. We also hope that this short chapter will give you a great understanding on how to use RHEL 7 on your hardware platform of choice. The topics for this chapter are broken down as follows: