The Red Hat company presented at the Red Hat Summit 2026 the project Fedora Hummingbird, offering a new continuously updated edition of Fedora Linux in the form of a collection of rolling containers. These containers are designed with a minimal set of components to reduce the attack surface and are promptly updated with the latest program versions from main projects. The installation process for updates is automated, and the project’s toolkit is open under the MIT license, available on GitLab.
The container images for Fedora Hummingbird are available for amd64 and arm64 architectures, with a catalog currently offering 49 container options (157 including FIPS and multi-arch editions). These containers allow for deploying environments with various open-source projects like Python, Go, Node.js, Rust, Ruby, and more, all following the “Distroless” principle of containing only necessary application components.
Majority of the packages in Hummingbird container images are sourced from the Fedora Rawhide repository, with the remaining 5% directly downloaded and compiled from upstream repositories. Separate RPM packages are maintained to build Hummingbird independently of Fedora, enabling project-specific optimizations. The compatibility of these assemblies with Docker Hub, Red Hat UBI, and other registries facilitates system migration to Hummingbird.
While CoreOS focuses on minimal build hosts for container orchestration, Hummingbird targets developers needing multiple runtime versions, supporting each version’s lifecycle separately. Most Hummingbird variants run under an unprivileged user by default, ensuring reproducible assembly and allowing users to rebuild containers from the provided source code. Security measures include isolating container contents in an environment without network access.