
In what's still seen as a very mixed blessing in some Linux circles, RHEL 7 was the first major business Linux distribution to move to the Systemd system initialization framework from the prior generation's System V Unix init. RHEL 7 added Docker containers. While Red Hat still supports Docker, since then, it's added the next wave of open standards-based container development tools such as Buildah, Skopeo, and Podman.

RHEL 8 has expanded this to include logging and session recording. RHEL System Roles make it easier to perform complex or routine system tasks, like establishing a storage system.RHEL 8 built on this introduced Application Streams - the next generation of packaging programmer tools and libraries.

