Last month, the Arctiq team attended Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2024 in Denver, Colorado. This year, AI dominated the conversation at Red Hat’s premier enterprise open-source event for IT professionals. The keynote addresses, breakout sessions, and demos focused on the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Generative AI, which is now integrated across Red Hat's product portfolio.
In this blog, we’ll cover some of the most exciting announcements and their significance for the future of IT operations.
Red Hat OpenShift AI offers a single, flexible platform to manage the deployment of AI applications throughout their lifecycle. It supports a variety of environments, from the cloud to the edge of the network, allowing developers to deploy AI models wherever they're needed. This streamlines the process and removes a layer of complexity, making AI development more accessible and efficient for businesses.
InstructLab marks a significant shift towards democratizing AI development by focusing on the training data. This innovative tool leverages a community-driven approach, allowing anyone to contribute their knowledge and expertise – from pop culture trivia to legal concepts – to help train powerful AI models. This collaborative effort fosters inclusivity and enriches the training data, leading to more versatile and accurate AI models.
Podman AI Lab empowers developers by providing a user-friendly interface for desktops, allowing developers to build and test AI-powered applications directly on their local machines. This eliminates the need for expensive infrastructure or extensive AI expertise. Developers can experiment with AI using familiar containerized workflows and their existing skillset, accelerating innovation cycles.
This expansion injects intelligence into existing Red Hat tools, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat Lightspeed automates complex tasks, troubleshoots problems, and optimizes system configurations, all powered by AI. This translates to significant productivity gains for developers and IT operations teams, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Red Hat is transforming how you deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with Image Mode. This new approach delivers the OS as a bootable container image, seamlessly integrating with container-native workflows. Image Mode bridges the gap between development and operations teams by allowing them to manage both applications and the OS with familiar container tools. This not only simplifies RHEL deployment but also opens the door for developers to experiment with AI in containerized environments using their existing skillset.
Ansible Policy as Code empowers users of the Ansible Automation Platform by automating policy enforcement across complex IT environments, including those infused with AI. Manual policy management can be error-prone and inefficient. Ansible Policy as Code streamlines workflows and enhances security by ensuring consistent compliance and governance through automated rules. Think of it as a set of automated instructions that keep everything running smoothly, especially in AI-powered environments where adherence to policies is crucial.
For the second year running, the Arctiq team hosted a post-Summit and AnsibleFest recap in Toronto, featuring Arctiq expert speakers Michael Kennedy (VP of Platform Engineering) and Aaron Fleming (VP of Security) alongside special guests from Red Hat: Ryan Clements (Ecosystem Solutions Architect) and Aaren DeJong (Senior Technical Product Manager for OpenShift Cloud Services). The event provided local tech enthusiasts with a deeper dive into the major announcements from Denver, including a live demo by Ryan Clements showcasing virtual machine migration to OpenShift Virtualization.
In addition, Michael Kennedy delved into several other noteworthy topics from Red Hat Summit that resonated with him. He delved into the key takeaways of a session called "Migrating thousands of virtual machines to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization at Ally Bank," that offered a compelling case study of how a leading financial institution leveraged Red Hat technology to modernize their virtualization systems.
The expo floor also showcased exciting innovations such as Oxide Computer Company unveiling their latest OpenShift Ready platform, an all-in-one, AMD-based hardware solution designed specifically for on-premises deployments. This platform combines control plane, compute, storage, and networking for a cost-effective and optimized solution for running OpenShift. Built with open-source technology, it empowers developers to deploy and manage containerized applications with greater efficiency.
Finally, Michael touched on Kepler, an open-source project by Red Hat that helps organizations monitor and optimize data center energy usage, aligning with Canadian Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) requirements. This technology empowers businesses to reduce their environmental impact alongside technological advancements.
Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2024 painted a clear picture: the future of IT is intertwined with AI. Red Hat’s commitment to making AI accessible and beneficial for organizations of all sizes was evident throughout the event. At Arctiq, we're excited to see how these innovations continue to evolve and empower businesses to achieve new levels of efficiency and productivity.
Missed the Summit? No Problem!
Even if you couldn't attend Red Hat Summit 2024, you can explore select content from the event, like keynote summaries and customer interviews here.
Mark your calendars! Next year's Summit will take place in Orlando, Florida, from May 12-15, 2025.