Red Hat (RHT) is pushing its container software stack hard in Fedora 24, the latest version of the open source, Linux-based OS that the company uses as a proving ground for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Red Hat announced the Fedora 24 release Tuesday. Like the last several Fedora releases, Fedora 24 is available in distinct cloud, server and workstation flavors, an idea introduced a couple of years ago as part of the Fedora.next initiative.

Containers

The most significant new features in Fedora 24 relate to containers, the cloud-friendly app deployment technology made famous by Docker. The cloud version of Fedora 24 integrates OpenShift Origin, Red Hat's platform for building containerized infrastructure. Along with OpenShift Origin comes Kubernetes, Red Hat's container orchestration tool of choice.

The new container features in Fedora debut at an important moment for the container ecosystem. This same week, Docker announced Docker Engine 1.12, which comes with built-in orchestration tools. That means the stakes are rising for container orchestration solutions, with Docker's home-grown tools and Kubernetes now looking like the main contenders. (OK, there's Apache Mesos, too.)

There's also accumulating evidence that container adoption has reached a watershed moment, with more enterprises migrating their traditional cloud-based virtual machines to containerized infrastructure.

Other Changes

There's a lot of other new stuff in Fedora 24, too. Desktop users will be happy to learn that it includes GNOME 3.2 and a technology preview of the Wayland display server, which promises to improve graphical applications on Linux-based operating systems.

Developers who run Fedora get an update to glibc 2.23 and improved POSIX compliance. In addition, the Fedora team has rebuilt all of the operating system's base packages using GCC 6.

RHEL's Future

For commercial Linux deployments, Fedora matters much less than RHEL, the open source OS that companies are more likely to deploy in production because it comes with commercial support. But since Red Hat tends to use Fedora as a place to test new technologies before including them in RHEL, it's a sign of things to come. A Kubernetes-centric container stack seems to be one of those things.