Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the expansion of Red Hat Lightspeed to all its platforms, incorporating enterprise-ready artificial intelligence (AI) across its hybrid cloud portfolio. Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed will offer advanced natural language processing capabilities, making it easier for both novice and experienced professionals to use Red Hat’s Linux and cloud-native enterprise application platforms. With the integration of generative AI, Red Hat aims to enhance productivity and efficiency for teams utilizing these platforms.
Initially incorporated in the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Lightspeed is designed to bridge skill gaps in the industry and address the complexity of enterprise IT, especially with the growth of hybrid cloud adoption. This tool allows users to be more precise and efficient while freeing up IT teams to drive greater innovation. By incorporating Red Hat Lightspeed into Red Hat’s core platforms, users will be able to apply Red Hat’s expertise in open source technologies to specific situations, reinforcing the value of a Red Hat subscription.
Generative AI converges with the hybrid cloud application platform
As a leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes technology, Red Hat OpenShift is commonly adopted across departments and teams with different roles and skill sets. OpenShift Lightspeed applies generative AI to how these groups deploy traditional and cloud-native applications in OpenShift clusters, simplifying application lifecycle management and resource scalability to meet demand. This means that novices in OpenShift can quickly build and develop the skills needed to run the application platform, while experts can leverage OpenShift Lightspeed as a force multiplier.
One of the many scenarios that OpenShift Lightspeed will be able to support is when a cluster reaches its maximum capacity and the user needs to take action to address it. It will suggest that the user enable automatic scaling and, after assessing that the clusters are hosted in a public cloud, recommend a new instance of the appropriate size. By further evaluating usage patterns, OpenShift Lightspeed could suggest enabling autoscaling down once capacity requirements decrease and even make additional recommendations, such as using GitOps to store this configuration and use it in other clusters.
Linux for the next generation of IT professionals
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed will help simplify how technology organizations deploy, manage, and maintain Linux environments. As scalability and system complexity become challenges even for the most experienced IT professionals, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed assists novice administrators and experienced operations teams in doing more, faster, with the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.
This capability is built on decades of Red Hat’s experience in enterprise Linux, using generative AI to help customers respond more swiftly to common questions and emerging issues. Consider the announcement of a new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE): Red Hat Enterprise Lightspeed could alert an administrator that a Red Hat Security Advisory (RHSA) with fixes has been released. It can then alert the user that some affected machines are in production and should not be taken offline, but that updates can be applied to affected development and test systems. Finally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed could help the user schedule patch application for the next production maintenance window, all through simple commands even with limited command line knowledge.
IT automation and open source innovation with generative AI
Since the launch of Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed in 2023, the service has been continuously refined to make code recommendations more relevant while improving the overall user experience. Some of these improvements include:
– Model personalization/tuning: IBM watsonx Code Assistant now allows Ansible Lightspeed users to utilize their existing Ansible content to train the model. Customers can enhance the quality and accuracy of their Ansible content with code recommendations tailored to specific needs and automation patterns within organizations.
– Admin panel: Red Hat account administrators can view measurement data on Ansible Lightspeed usage, including generative AI request monitoring metrics and information on how end users are utilizing the service.
In addition to the Red Hat Lightspeed portfolio, Red Hat continues its commitment to innovation in open source communities by bringing generative AI to projects like Konveyor in the future.
Availability
OpenShift Lightspeed availability is targeted for late 2024. Those interested in learning more about early access can sign up for more information. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed is in the planning phase, with more information coming soon. The new Ansible Lightspeed features are already available for general use.
Hybrid cloud is hybrid. And so is AI
For over 30 years, open source technologies have combined rapid innovation with significant reductions in IT costs and barriers to innovation. Red Hat has been at the forefront of this trend for almost as long, from providing open enterprise Linux platforms with RHEL in the early 2000s to driving containers and Kubernetes as the foundation of open hybrid cloud and cloud-native computing with Red Hat OpenShift.
This momentum continues with Red Hat empowering AI/ML strategies through open hybrid cloud, enabling AI workloads to run where the data is, whether in the data center, multiple public clouds, or at the edge. Beyond workloads, Red Hat’s vision for AI takes training and model tuning down this path to better address constraints around data sovereignty, compliance, and operational integrity. The consistency offered by Red Hat platforms in these environments, regardless of where they run, is crucial for maintaining the flow of innovation in AI.