Automating modernization: Takeaways from Red Hat Summit 2023

Major announcements from Red Hat Summit 2023

With all the new advancements for developers announced at this year's conference, it is easy to see how the tech stack can improve how developers build, release and deploy applications. But these announcements also take into consideration the past, present and future states of applications.

The most notable announcements included the following:

• Red Hat Service Interconnect. This tool for hybrid cloud application networking simplifies connecting applications and services across clouds, containers, VMs and bare metal while protecting data, making applications portable in a distributed cloud environment.
• Red Hat Developer Hub and Red Hat plugins for Backstage. With integrations with Git and Jenkins across standards and tech stacks, these tools leverage the Backstage developer portal and provide a consistent developer experience across physical, virtual and hybrid hyperscalers as well as OpenShift.
• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service. This offering secures Kubernetes deployments across hybrid environments with management through Red Hat and a flexible consumption model.
• Red Hat OpenShift AI. This update expands Red Hat OpenShift Data Science to scale AI innovation, deliver consistency in cloud-to-edge deployments and provide end-to-end lifecycle management for IBM Watson and Ansible Lightspeed.
• RHEL management with Red Hat Insights. This tool enables teams to monitor cloud health from a browser via redhat.com while enhancing value with a single management experience.
• RHEL for third-party Linux migration. This RHEL update was built to maintain consistency when converting from CentOS Linux 7, which allows for updated security. Access to developer subscription and Convert2RHEL tooling and customizations lets teams move to cloud instances without recreating instances. It is available on premises as well as in the cloud.
• Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain. Delivered as a cloud service, this tool integrates security guardrails into every phase of the software development life cycle, from code builds to release to monitoring.
• Event-Driven Ansible (EDA). EDA is focused on service delivery and automated decision-making, leveraging numerous sources of events. It can be implemented within and across different IT use cases for greater efficiency, improved service delivery and cost savings.
• Ansible Lightspeed (formerly Project Wisdom). Lightspeed aims to deliver domain-specific AI focused on automation with transparency and choice inherent to the user experience and allows for specific automation knowledge that is broadly accessible.
• Podman Desktop, community edition. This tool, built for application developers leveraging containers and Kubernetes, can be installed and run anywhere across containers and pods, providing enterprise readiness and bridges between local and remote OpenShift clusters.

With these advancements, Red Hat promises to provide a simplified approach to building, managing, automating, securing and scaling any workload in any footprint across any location.

Enterprise Strategy Group Analyst Wrap-up of Red Hat Summit and Ansiblefest

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Takeaways from the conference: Looking ahead

By providing a unified technology stack, Red Hat could reduce the burden on organizations by potentially eliminating the need to require IT and developers to learn different ways of building, delivering and deploying applications. This is an ongoing challenge for organizations: The IT skills gap and lack of hiring resources are causing projects to take longer or not be completed at all.

In fact, 67% of organizations are hiring generalists over specialists in the next 12 to 18 months, according to "2023 Distributed Cloud Series: Cloud-Native Research," a report from TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group. It is important that technical staff is optimized and working efficiently as project workloads increase.

Red Hat is providing a unified tech stack that not only harmonizes the learning curve from on-premises to the edge to the cloud, but also optimizes application automation and deployment with these new announcements. This is not a silver bullet, but it does provide a way to reduce the complexity organizations are facing in a multi-cloud, multi-location world: In the same report, Enterprise Strategy Group found that 94% of organizations are running workloads on two or more cloud service providers.

It is great to see the Red Hat vision come to life. The passion Matt Hicks, Chris Wright and the entire Red Hat team showed during the sessions felt authentic, and they truly believe Red Hat is making advancements solving organizational challenges.

Not surprisingly, Red Hat Summit with AnsibleFest was a highly technically focused event, and I believe they could have better connected the tech announcements to the business problems. But they connected well with the audience, who were engaged during the keynotes and sessions. The customer examples and case studies were also very good and worth a look for those considering the offerings for their own organizations.