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Introduction to the Red Hat Universal Base Image

Here in this blog, we are going to learn the introduction to the Red Hat universal Base Image.

Choosing the appropriate base

Why choose Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) among the many options available for container base images? To begin with, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the source of all the code in Red Hat Universal Base Image (RHEL). I need to go over RHEL’s mission before I can explain why you should choose UBI.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is your go-to source for safe and dependable Linux innovation that streamlines your workloads.

Given that UBI is derived from RHEL and containers are Linux, UBI shares the following values:

1. Innovate: Streamline operations and centralize development and management to create consistency from the data center to the edge. Organizations are always looking for new and efficient ways to innovate.
2. Optimize: Complex infrastructure can quickly drive up expenses and cut productivity.
3. Protect: Most organizations may find it difficult to continuously mitigate risk across the hybrid cloud, including when it comes to creating, growing, and managing workloads.
4. Trust: Managing the complexity of application life cycles, workload compatibility, security patching, and compliance reporting is an ongoing challenge for organizations.

The userland—all of the applications, libraries, and dependencies that come with an operating system—of the Linux operating system is made lighter by containers. Applications run inside containers reduce these dependencies to a minimum, but the container base image remains an operating system and its quality is just as important as that of the host operating system. Much like creating a standard operating environment (SOE), choosing the appropriate container base image for your company has implications for security and life cycle management.

Red Hat started providing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) images when RHEL 7 was released (we also released RHEL 6 images shortly after), realizing early on how important base images were for organizations. These images gave RHEL users access to more advanced, secure, and efficient enterprise-grade containers. In addition to familiarity, running RHEL container images on RHEL container hosts provides compatibility and portability between environments. One issue existed, though one of the main benefits of containers was that our customers could not simply share the container images they created outside of their company due to the enterprise agreement bundled with an RHEL subscription.

Two significant changes occurred with the release of the Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI):

1. Users of UBI have the ability to share container images they create with anyone, both inside and outside their company.
2. All of the content released in Red Hat Universal Base Image is accessible to non-customers.

Now, everyone can benefit from the enhanced dependability, security footprint, and performance of official Red Hat container images. As a result, you can create a containerized application on UBI, upload it to any container registry server, and distribute it globally. You can create, share, and work together on your containerized application from anywhere at any time using UBI.

Applications built on UBI can be run and shared anywhere you choose, but when they are run on RHEL or Red Hat OpenShift, more functionality becomes available. This is how it operates:

1. Run anywhere to obtain the same high-quality components, but only community and self-sufficiency.
2. Use RHEL or OpenShift: both offer the same high-quality components, but Red Hat provides complete support; to get assistance, just submit a support ticket.

Motives for utilizing UBI

These needs and wants might assist you in determining whether universal basic income (UBI) is appropriate for your company:

1. My developers are looking for a top-notch container image that they can share with the public.
2. An enterprise life cycle and a supportable base image are what my operations team is looking for.
3. Delivering a Red Hat Certified Container with joint Red Hat support is the aim of my team.
4. My clients require enterprise support within their Red Hat setup.
5. My community still desires a very high-quality container image, but they also want to share containerized apps more freely.

Continue reading if any or all of these apply to your company!

Greater than a simple picture

Three things make up UBI, which is less than an operating system:

1. ubi-micro, ubi-minimal, ubi standard and ubi-init are the four base image sets.
2. An array of runtime images for various languages (e.g., PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, Node.js).
3. A group of related packages that fulfill shared application dependencies within a YUM repository

Everything on UBI is a subset of RHEL. When used with RHEL or OpenShift, all of the packages in UBI are sourced from RHEL channels and receive the same level of support as RHEL:

To deliver high-quality support for container images, a significant amount of engineering, security analysis, and resources are required. Testing of the base images as well as their behavior on a specific container host is necessary.

Red Hat has put a lot of effort into engineering and support, which has made it possible for UBI 8 to run on RHEL 9 hosts and UBI 9 to run on RHEL 8 hosts, among other combinations, to make upgrade challenges easier. With platform upgrades, users can now upgrade applications in the container image or the underlying container hosts with greater assurance and flexibility. See the Red Hat Portal’s Container Compatibility Matrix for an exhaustive list of supported systems.