Red Hat aims to integrate build and deployment processes for cloud native systems into the Linux operating system.

Red Hat wants to make it easy to start up entire Linux-based operating systems, similar to how you can quickly start apps using containers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the company's flagship Linux distribution, is now bootable as a container image. Otherwise, this image will contain all the running code that is generally excluded from a container, such as kernel-firmware.

This week in Denver, the company is holding its annual user conference, the Red Hat Summit, where it announced these initiatives.

Colin Walters, a senior engineer at Red Hat, said that this was a necessary part of the business during a summit session. Using more cloud native tooling means relying on shared ownership and open source maintenance rather than creating a separate infrastructure bin.

This is not the usual package mode for the company. The final version of a new RHEL release is distributed as a standalone package for installation on a server or virtual machine. The administrator can then customize the package for particular workloads.

Nowadays, applications are managed using containers, which is different from the traditional package mode that has been used in Linux distributions for a long time.

Ben Breard, Red Hat's senior principal marketing manager, stated during a press conference that the goal is to use knowledge gained from containers to improve the management of operating systems. This would avoid completely separate management of the two worlds.