It expanded Red Hat Lightspeed to more products, revealed updates to OpenShift AI, launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) AI, and introduced Podman AI Lab. 

Red Hat Lightspeed expands to OpenShift and RHEL

This generative AI offering was first incorporated into Ansible at the end of 2023. 

According to Red Hat, OpenShift Lightspeed changes how developers interact with OpenShift by applying generative AI to the deployment and management processes. For instance, when a cluster is at capacity, Lightspeed might suggest the user enable autoscaling. 

In RHEL, Lightspeed will enable users to simplify their Linux operations by answering common questions and solving problems, such as flagging when a fix to a CVE has been released so that the user can apply it or helping a user with limited command line knowledge schedule patching for a maintenance window. 

“Red Hat Lightspeed puts AI to work, instantly, enabling the rapid acquisition of new skills while scaling existing expertise, from building the foundation of the hybrid cloud with Red Hat Enterprise Linux to bringing cloud-native applications to life with Red Hat OpenShift to managing distributed environments with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform,” said Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and chief product officer at Red Hat.

OpenShift AI gets several updates in version 2.9

OpenShift AI is an offering that allows companies to build and deploy AI-powered applications throughout their hybrid cloud environments. 

With the release of OpenShift AI 2.9, there is greater support for deployment of applications to the edge. It now supports inference capabilities in those resource-limited environments.

OpenShift AI also now supports the use of multiple model servers, which allows users to run AI on a single platform for multiple use cases. Support was added for KServe, vLLM and text generation inference server (TGIS), and serving engines for LLMs and Caikit-nlp-tgis runtime. 

Additionally, there are new features that support model development, including updated project workspaces, additional workbench images, and enhanced CUDA.

Other new additions in OpenShift AI 2.9 include monitoring visualizations, new accelerator profiles, and distributed workloads with Ray, using CodeFlare and KubeRay. 

“Bringing AI into the enterprise is no longer an ‘if,’ it’s a matter of ‘when,’” said Badani. “Enterprises need a more reliable, consistent and flexible AI platform that can increase productivity, drive revenue and fuel market differentiation. Red Hat’s answer for the demands of enterprise AI at scale is Red Hat OpenShift AI, making it possible for IT leaders to deploy intelligent applications anywhere across the hybrid cloud while growing and fine-tuning operations and models as needed to support the realities of production applications and services.” 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI released

With RHEL AI, users get access to a platform for developing, testing, and deploying generative AI models.

It includes supported versions of IBM’s open-source Granite LLM family and InstructLab’s model alignment tools. 

RELATED CONTENT: Red Hat Enterprise Linux looks to the future of AI with Image Mode for RHEL

InstructLab is a joint effort between IBM and Red Hat, based on IBM Research’s Large-scale Alignment for chatBots (LAB) approach, which uses data and skills tied to a taxonomy to generate synthetic data to train models. 

“The InstructLab project aims to put LLM development into the hands of developers by making, building and contributing to an LLM as simple as contributing to any other open source project,” Red Hat said in its announcement.

RHEL AI is available as an RHEL image that can be deployed individually or it can be accessed through OpenShift AI.  

Red Hat also offers enterprise product distribution, 24×7 production support and extended  lifecycle support.

“To truly lower the entry barriers for AI innovation, enterprises need to be able to expand the roster of who can work on AI initiatives while simultaneously getting these costs under control. With InstructLab alignment tools, Granite models and RHEL AI, Red Hat aims to apply the benefits of true open source projects – freely accessible and reusable, transparent and open to contributions – to GenAI in an effort to remove these obstacles,” the company said.

Red Hat announces Podman AI Lab

Podman AI Lab is an extension to Podman Desktop, which is a graphical interface for building and deploying Kubernetes containers. 

With Podman AI Lab, developers gain access to a similar graphical interface for building and deploying generative AI workloads on their own devices. 

It includes a sample library with templates for common generative AI applications that can be built upon, including chatbots, text summarizers, code generators, object detection, and audio-to-text.

The AI Lab also includes a playground environment where users can interact with and observe their models. 

“The AI era is here, but for many application developers, building intelligent applications presents a steep learning curve. Podman AI Lab presents a familiar, easy-to-use tool, and playground environment to apply AI models to their code and workflows safely and more securely, without requiring costly infrastructure investments or extensive AI expertise,” said Sarwar Raza, vice president and general manager of the application developer business unit at Red Hat.

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The first new addition is Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer, now generally available, which allows developers to cryptographically sign and verify application artifacts with a keyless certificate authority. 

According to Red Hat, the benefit of this new offering is that it enables organizations to be more confident about the integrity of software without having to manage a centralized key management system. 

Next, the company announced Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer, also now generally available, which provides a single source of truth for documentation like Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) and Vulnerability Exploitability Exchange (VEX).

And finally, Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline, now in beta, incorporates supply chain security capabilities into software templates that developers use. The company explained that this new offering will provide more traceability and auditability throughout the CI/CD pipeline. 

“Organizations are seeking to mitigate the risks of constantly evolving security threats in their software development – to keep and grow trust with users, customers and partners,” said Sarwar Raza, vice president and general manager of the Application Developer Business Unit at Red Hat. “Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain is designed to seamlessly bring security capabilities into every phase of the software development life cycle. From code time to runtime, these tools help increase transparency and trust and give DevSecOps teams the ability to lay the groundwork for a more secure enterprise without impacting developer velocity or cognitive load.”

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The new release — JBoss EAP 8 — updates its Jakarta EE support to include version 10, which is the most current version.  

It also includes a new provisioning system to help better empower developers to manage deployment of apps regardless of where they are deployed, including bare metal, virtual machines, cloud, and Red Hat OpenShift. The new system also reduces disparity between the testing and staging environment and the production environment, the company explained.

JBoss EAP 8 also includes improvements to the tools used to interact with cloud environments. In this release, developers gain more control over how they deploy JBoss EAP across Red Hat OpenShift. The company also added a JBoss EAP Maven plugin, which improves the configuration process. 

To improve security, Red Hat also added native support for OpenID Connect, which makes it easier to integrate with platforms that are compliant with that protocol. The company also removed some legacy security frameworks from the JBoss EAP.

Other new features in this release include an updated migration toolkit, datasources feature pack support, and JBoss EAP XP 5.0.

“Application modernization continues to be a top priority for customers,” said Joe Fernandes, vice president and GM, Hybrid Cloud Platforms, Red Hat. “Red Hat JBoss EAP 8 delivers enhancements that provide upgraded security integration and reduce operational overhead, enabling customers to not only extend the product life cycle for modern applications, but to take advantage of cloud native platforms that provide a connected foundation for applications to run seamlessly across environments.”

More information about JBoss EAP 8 is available here.

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The Developer Hub was created to equip DevOps teams with the tools needed to overcome bottlenecks and other issues, like complexity, lack of standardization, and cognitive load, according to the company. 

Developer Hub features a self-service portal that provides developers with all the information they could need in one location. This includes access to different consoles, a software catalog, and up-to-date documentation. This benefits not only existing employees, but makes the onboarding process easier for new employees by making things easier to find. 

It also provides several software templates, which makes it easier for developers to set up the boilerplate code needed to start building their own software on top of. 

The platform features dynamic plug-in management capabilities, using the same plug-in architecture as Backstage. Developers can install, update, and remove plug-ins without having to bring the system down. Users can download verified plug-ins from Red Hat or bring in community plug-ins that suit their needs. 

One of Red Hat’s official plug-ins provides role-based access control (RBAC) capabilities, which gives admins more control over who has access to what. 

“Internal developer platforms provide that sweet spot where domain knowledge and best practices intersect with standardized tooling and processes, delivering a developer experience that results in higher productivity, faster time-to-market, and a more effective path to innovation,” said Balaji Sivasubramanian, senior director of Developer Tools Product Management at Red Hat. “Red Hat Developer Hub enables organizations to fast-track the adoption of IDPs and scale them across the enterprise in a flexible, more secure and fully supported manner.”

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First, the company announced the general availability of Red Hat Device Edge, which was created to provide a platform for deploying devices at the edge. It includes an operating system optimized for the edge and a supported distribution of the lightweight Kubernetes project MicroShift, providing customers with two deployment options.

According to Red Hat, other benefits include a minimal footprint, a consistent operational experience, workload flexibility, and simplified deployment.  

Next, it released Red Hat OpenShift 4.14. The latest version includes the general availability of hosted control planes, which reduces management costs, improves cluster provisioning time, helps overcome limitations due to cluster scale, and decouples control planes from workloads for greater security. Red Hat claims that hosted control planes can save 30% in infrastructure costs and 60% in developer time. 

Other capabilities include the ability to run virtual machines and containers side by side using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, support for NVIDIA GPU accelerators, and the availability of Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Marketplace. 

The company also revealed it has donated five new plugins to Backstage, which is a framework for building developer portals. The technologies that correspond to the new plugins include Azure Container Registry, JFrog Artifactory, Kiali, Nexus, and 3scale. 

This isn’t the first time Red Hat has contributed to the Backstage community. In 2022, the company first joined that community and then donated five plugins back in May of this year. Those plugins include Application Topology for Kubernetes, Multi Cluster View with Open Cluster Management, Container Image Registry for Quay, Pipelines with Tekton, and Authentication and Authorization with Keycloak. 

“We believe the future of developer productivity depends on the continued evolution and innovation of projects like Backstage, and we’re focused on making this future a reality through contributions that help simplify, extend and accelerate the development process,” said Balaji Sivasubramanian, senior director of Developer Tools Product Management at Red Hat. “Donating these plug-ins to the Backstage community is a reflection of Red Hat’s commitment to helping developers meet the demands of today as they innovate for tomorrow.”

 Finally, Red Hat launched Ansible Inside, which allows developers to embed Ansible Playbooks inside their applications. According to the company, this offering was built for customers who want to embed automation in their applications, but don’t require all of the capabilities offered by Ansible Automation Platform.

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Smart factories, or software-defined factories, are playing a crucial role in amplifying the speed at which manufacturers can innovate. According to a report by McKinsey, “Smart manufacturing has the potential to create up to $3.7 trillion in value by 2025, driving growth, innovation, and competitiveness across sectors.” By breaking down the barriers between IT and OT, manufacturers can embrace collaboration with new functionality and proactively strengthen and speed up operations, with the flexibility and intelligence to scale based on demand. 

The industrial edge platform is intended to provide a holistic solution that spans from real-time shop floor control and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to full IT manageability – delivering greater customer choice for data gravity or edge-to-cloud style architectures and improved overall equipment efficiency (OEE). To continuously support this effort, Red Hat and Intel are working to integrate Intel-based platforms and Intel Edge Controls for Industrial (Intel ECI) with current and future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, starting with collaboration in upstream Linux communities like the Fedora Project and CentOS Stream. This collaboration extends to bringing these controls and platforms to Red Hat Device Edge (early access), Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift. With this collaboration organizations can benefit from:

• Fully integrated real-time capabilities from silicon to software, to support industrial automation for predictable performance;
• Advanced management and network automation for system deployment and management without heavy handed resource usage, simplifying the industrial network creation and management using open standards-based tools;
• Scalability and flexibility through a software-defined platform approach that facilitates more portable, scalable control and maximizes adaptability;
• Uninterrupted operations supported by high-availability and redundancy attributes built-in with the platform;
• Simplified AI workload integration with the ability to take an AI workload and run it next to a control workload, helping simplify hardware complexity, and enabling AI to more easily improve product quality, system uptime, maintenance needs and more;
• Enhanced cybersecurity posture by removing human error elements with automated patching and updates, an immutable operating system plane and a platform built on hardened, production-tested components.

To underpin this platform, Red Hat – in collaboration with Intel – will deliver a real-time kernel that provides lower latency and reduced jitter, helping applications run repeatedly with greater reliability. This new industrial edge platform will be built on open standards and community-driven innovation, driven by thousands of developers globally, helping to drive more simplified integration with other hardware and software components. Additionally, core code transparency and a clear roadmap and release cycle help take the guesswork out of when new releases are available and their accompanying features. Red Hat’s industry-leading enterprise developer support backs IT teams with a best-in-class developer toolchain, bringing greater deployment consistency regardless of deployment model or integrator, further removing guesswork and choice paralysis around modern developer tooling. 

Software-defined factories in action

Manufacturing innovation has been hampered by the limitations of legacy industrial controls and siloed organizational structures for decades. With this new platform, organizations will be able to benefit from an open edge platform that allows simplified integration of components in an easy-to-use, reliable solution for industrial automation. Industry leaders like ABB and Schneider Electric and Codesys are already working to successfully implement new industrial edge platforms to build modern industrial controls.

Supporting Quotes

Francis Chow, vice president and general manager, In-Vehicle Operating System and Edge, Red Hat

“From transforming traditional IT infrastructures to helping software-defined vehicles deliver scalable digital solutions across industrial edge, Red Hat has a proven history in driving not just modernization across industries, but innovation. Now, Red Hat has set our sights on bringing that same level of transformation to manufacturing plants across the globe with a new edge platform with Intel. We believe that by helping converge both IT and operational technologies, the next industrial revolution can arrive sooner, more quickly and built on a backbone of open source software.”

Christine Boles, vice president in the network and edge group and general manager of federal and industrial solutions, Intel Corporation

“For years, Intel and Red Hat have worked together to transform and support a range of industries. Bringing together Red Hat’s expertise in cloud-to-edge application platform delivery and Intel’s strength in edge to cloud compute platforms, including industrial hardware and software, will deliver the software-defined capabilities and transformation to meet the resilient, flexible and reliable requirements of today’s manufacturing.”

Additional Resources

• Learn more about our work with Intel and Schneider Electric
• Learn more about our collaboration with ABB
• Listen to our Technically Speaking episodes: Machine Learning Model Drift & MLOps Pipelines and A Composable Industrial Edge Platform 
• Learn more about Red Hat Device Edge, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
• Read more about Red Hat’s work in the industrial sector

Connect with Red Hat

• Learn more about Red Hat
• Get more news in the Red Hat newsroom
• Read the Red Hat blog
• Follow Red Hat on Twitter
• Follow Red Hat on Instagram
• Watch Red Hat videos on YouTube
• Follow Red Hat on LinkedIn

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are based on the company’s current assumptions regarding future business and financial performance.  These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statement in this press release speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

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A couple of weeks later, the open-source software company SUSE said it would create a fork of RHEL and maintain a distribution for it. 

Now SUSE is announcing it has joined forces with CIQ and Oracle to form the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA). This new group will help “encourage the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free Enterprise Linux (EL) source code.”

OpenELA will provide all the sources that are needed for RHEL downstreams to exist. Their initial focus will be on RHEL EL8 and EL9, and they are also considering EL7. 

Their core tenets include full compliance with the existing standard, timely updates and fixes, transparency, community, and ensuring that RHEL remains free and redistributable. 

“Many large organizations reached out to us to express the importance of community-driven source code for EL that can act as a starting point for compatible distributions,” said Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle Linux development at Oracle. “OpenELA is our response to this need, and it represents a commitment to helping the open-source community continue to develop compatible EL distributions.”

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The solution is based on the open-source project Skupper.io, which enables secure communication across Kubernetes clusters with no VPNs or special firewall rules.

According to Red Hat, application architectures are changing to take advantage of the open hybrid cloud and require flexible, secure connections for applications. AI/ML applications can be distributed across on-premises, edge and cloud systems, and businesses require connections across multiple clouds and infrastructures. This requires coordination between developers, network admins and security admins to set up trusted, specific connections, which can slow developer productivity and innovation, the company explained.

Red Hat Service Interconnect facilitates communication between multiple platforms and clouds, allowing developers to add reliable, secure connections between applications running on Kubernetes clusters, virtual machines, and bare-metal hosts. These connections can be implemented across any infrastructure, from traditional data centers to the edge and cloud, according to Red Hat. 

With this simplified process, developers no longer need extensive privilege or networking knowledge to establish connections to speed up the development process and stay compliant with security requirements.

Red Hat Service Interconnect is a service customers can use in their hybrid and multi-cloud strategies to either modernize existing apps or migrate them across infrastructures or between clouds. This ensures application connections are migrated without any downtime, helping with effective compliance and risk management, as well as maximizing operational efficiency for application and network teams.

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The Red Hat Developer Hub is built from the open-source project Backstage and was built to help navigate the sprawl that DevOps teams often face, according to the company. 

Internal developer portals must be created and maintained which has become a much more complicated task today due to the occurrence of large enterprises inhabited by various tools, continuously innovating security parameters, and legislation that varies by industry and location. The platform was built to improve experiences on platforms related to Kubernetes and containers such as Red Hat OpenShift.

The platform offers a single pane of glass to view all available developer tools and resources to increase productivity, self-service capabilities and guardrails for cloud-native application development, and proper security and governance for developers across the enterprise. 

Red Hat created a package of six plug-ins, titled Red Hat Plug-ins for Backstage that links integral systems to Backstage. The plug-ins include: 

• Application Topology for Kubernetes, which allows developers to inspect the real-time status of software and IT resources allocated to any Kubernetes aim, such as Red Hat OpenShift, with enhanced accuracy. 
• Multicluster View with Open Cluster Manager (OCM), which presents users a peek into groups from Open Cluster Manager’s MulticlusterHub and Multicluster Engine inside Backstage. 
• Container Image Registry for Quay, which updates and accelerates engagement with Quay registries by furnishing an overview into container image data. That involves security slips (CVEs) associated with deployed images
• Pipelines with Tekton, which offers users an insight into the specifics of all Tekton pipeline runs and respective situations throughout all services.
• Authentication and Authorization with Keycloak, which enables platform technicians to load users and groups from Keycloak into Backstage.
• GitOps with Argo CD, which assists in monitoring the health and state of the Argo CD status for services within Backstage.

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It is object oriented programming and functional programming friendly and, according to the company, it works to allow programmers to efficiently solve optimization problems.

This open-source tool improves plans and schedules with hard constraints and soft constraints which apply to plain domain objects and can call existing code. 

OptaPlanner also supports continuous planning to publish the schedule weekly, three days before execution; non-disruptive replanning for changes to a published schedule; real-time planning to react quickly on disruptions, overconstrained planning for when there are not enough resources to cover work; and pinning so the user is still in control of their schedule.

It combines artificial intelligence optimization algorithms such as Tabu Search, Simulated Annealing, Late Acceptance, and other metaheuristics, with score calculation and other constraint solving techniques for NP-complete or NP-hard problems.

OptaPlanner works directly with Java, Kotlin, Scala, and Python; integrates with both Quarkas and Spring boot; and runs on Kubernetes and Openshift as well as all major clouds.

Lastly, the Red Hat build of OptaPlanner is now included in Red Hat Applications Foundations. This allows users to build scalable planning applications that work to solve complex optimization challenges.

These challenges include rostering, vehicle routing, scheduling, or many other constraint satisfaction problems.

For more information, visit the website. 

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