Red Hat has announced a number of new updates coming to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to make it more accessible to developers and development teams.

“Just as in the past, we’re committed to making the RHEL ecosystem work for as broad a community as we can, whether it’s individuals or organizations seeking to run a stable Linux backend; community projects maintaining large CI/Build systems; open source developers looking toward “what’s next;” educational institutions, hardware, and software vendors looking to bundle solutions; or enterprises needing a rock-solid production platform,” Red Hat wrote in a post

First, it is introducing a no-cost version for small production workloads. According to Red Hat, no-cost RHEL currently exists through the Red Hat Developer program, but the program’s terms limited it such that it could only be used by single-machine developers. Now, the no-cost RHEL can be used for up to 16 systems.  

This expanded Red Hat Developer program can also be used to run RHEL on public clouds like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. 

Red Hat also announced a no-cost RHEL for customer development teams. This will make it easier for teams—not just individual developers—to take advantage of the Red Hat Developer program. Teams can now be added to the program at no additional cost, and RHEL can be deployed through Red Hat Cloud Access.

According to Red Hat, these programs don’t address every use case its customers have, so it is continuing to find ways to make RHEL more accessible. It will provide another update in mid-February. 

“We want to make RHEL easier to use and are removing many barriers that stand in the way, working to keep pace with the evolving needs of Linux users, our customers and our partners. This requires us to continuously examine our development and business models to meet these changing needs. We believe that these new programs — and those to follow — work toward that goal,” Red Hat wrote.