The Fedora project has announced the release of Fedora 21. Fedora is a community-based distro sponsored by Red Hat that often serves as a test bed for new technologies that will one day be part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller calls Fedora 21 a "game-changer for the Fedora project."
The new release reflects the principles of the Fedora.next initiative, which was intended to chart a course for the next 10 years of Fedora development. Fedora 21 comes in three flavors: Server, Workstation, and Cloud. Each flavor builds upon a common "base" set of packages and adds additional functionality targeted to the use case.
The Server edition comes with several new system management features and includes rolekit , a "role deployment and management toolkit that provides a consistent interface to administrators to install and configure all the packages needed to implement a specific server role." The Workstation edition includes the Wayland display technology and provides improvements to the installer and terminal application. The DevAssistant tool provides a fast and simple means for developers to configure different programming environments.
The Cloud edition includes built-in support for OpenStack and Docker. The cloud version is smaller and lighter than other editions and excludes extraneous packages such as hardware drivers that aren't necessary for operating in the cloud. Fedora 21 is also the first release to offer an image tailored for Red Hat's Project Atomic, which provides a streamlined operating system intended to run in virtual containers.