The 2024 Red Hat® Summit and AnsibleFest will take place at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver from May 6 through 9, 2024. I’m really looking forward to attending this event in my adopted hometown, but I’ve got to warn you—May is the month with the least predictable weather, so be prepared. I have experienced both plowable snow and sunny days above 80 degrees in early May. What I’m saying is you might want to bring a coat, an umbrella, and some sunscreen in addition to your enthusiasm for open source.
Living here, I’ve “discovered”—everyone in Denver knows these places—some fantastic restaurants beyond the usual NFL city/convention center adjacent chains (Cheesecake Factory, Bubba Gump’s, Ruth’s Chris) that won’t break the bank or your diet.
Weather aside—you’ve been warned—I’m looking forward to a couple of Red Hat Conference sessions on observability and sustainability, two areas that are getting increasing attention in the open source community.
Serverless observability with OpenTelemetry. Daniel Oh’s talk on how to observe serverless functions with OpenTelemetry, Jaeger (distributed tracing), Knative , and Kubernetes should be a good one on instrumentation—the bane of “legacy” observability approaches, now championed and heavily supported by commercial Full Stack Observability purveyor, Cisco, now with added Splunk. I’m looking forward to seeing how OpenTelemetry works in serverless and exactly what sorts of differentiated metrics there are to be collected.
Update on Red Hat’s vision for sustainability and the Kepler project. I’m particularly excited for this session on IT sustainability. Sustainability in computing is becoming increasingly crucial, and we simply need to find ways to make our systems more efficient. This session focuses on Red Hat’s vision for Kepler, a Kubernetes tool that helps enterprises understand and reduce their energy consumption.
This aligns perfectly with our recent research: The Role of ESG Programs in IT Decision Making, Enterprise Strategy Group, September 2022) which highlights the importance of translating broad environmental, social, and governance and sustainability goals into actionable steps. Kepler, with its focus on real-world power use metrics for reporting and reduction, exemplifies this approach to operationalizing sustainability. Red Hat, along with IBM and Intel, have been major contributors to this Cloud Native Computing Foundation project that leverages eBPF to gather energy related system stats and exports them as Prometheus metrics. I want to see how Red Hat envisions the future.
AnsibleFest Keynote: Automation, AI, and the next enterprise IT revolution. Revolution is not a word to be thrown around lightly, but when it comes to the impact that AI and automation can have on IT, Enterprise Strategy Group’s own research concurs that the future of IT involves automation and AI to accelerate operations anywhere from 25 to 100% over the next few years. Ansible plays a key role in automation for many organizations, so it will be interesting to hear how Red Hat envisions Ansible in the revolutionary era of AI.
Plus, it’s an industry trade show so it’s obligatory to speak about artificial intelligence. I wonder if Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is going to turn up on the main stage?
Mile-high oxygen bar. The event planners had enough foresight to include the oxygen bar on the daily agenda. Folks, the air is thinner here. The sun is brighter. Seriously, people. Stay hydrated and if need be stay oxygenated. Altitude sickness can ruin your day.
Dining Tips
I’m a Denver transplant. Here are a couple of insider meal tips for your stay in the Mile High City.
- The most Denver place to eat: Sams No. 3. Do not miss the green chili. Seriously, it’s one of the best things about Denver. You can walk there easily from the convention center.
- A good place for dinner away from the show: Rioja, a cozy modern Mediterranean spot in Larimer Square, a neighborhood that can be interesting even if you don’t eat here.
- A good place to go if you’re not paying: Uchi, a very modern sushi restaurant. Yes, there is one in Austin, too. It’s really great sushi despite being thousands of miles from any coast.
I am looking forward to seeing you at the show and I hope you enjoy the Mile High City.
