Today's applications are revenue-critical and highly complex, a recipe for high blood pressure and long work hours on the part of the IT architect. Ensuring application performance, availability, and consistency is becoming increasingly important to businesses -- but for many companies still remains an elusive pipe dream. It is the job of the IT architect to engineer these complex systems to meet performance and availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs), business expectations, and the CFO bottom line. Achieving this 

"nirvana" in today's challenging IT environments is a matter of harnessing the power of automation to drive down risk and cost. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 delivers tools enabling IT specialists to add resiliency to complex execution environments. RHEL is an enterprise-grade operating system (OS) with features that automate the active management of the resource contentions that underlie many application-related problems. By capturing and leveraging the inherent strengths of the RHEL platform, IT teams can provision highly reliable applications that meet or exceed performance and availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs). 

This paper focuses on capabilities built in to RHEL 6.0, such as control groups (cgroups), which empower application architects to shift focus from managing infrastructure to their "real job" -- meeting the needs of business users with intelligent application architecture.