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Tag: Red Hat Summit

  • Red Hat Adds Generative AI and Event-Driven Capabilities to Ansible

    Red Hat Adds Generative AI and Event-Driven Capabilities to Ansible

    Red Hat today unveiled a technical preview of Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) service specifically trained on domain-specific data collected via the Ansible automation platform.

    At the same time, Red Hat is also making available an event-driven capability within version 2.4 of the Ansible platform that enables runbooks and other tasks to automatically execute when received from a third-party tool or application.

    Both capabilities were announced at the Red Hat Summit and are part of an ongoing Red Hat effort to democratize IT automation.

    First previewed within the Project Wisdom initiative launched by Red Hat and IBM Research last year, Ansible Lightspeed IBM Watson Code Assistant is based on a large language model (LLM) that was developed using Ansible data. Watson Code Assistant, currently in technical preview, is a service that automatically generates suggestions to improve code as developers create an application. IBM promised to make IBM Watson Code Assistant available later this year.

    Red Hat is now applying that generative AI capability to the YAML code that DevOps teams need to create Ansible playbooks. IT teams can create a simple natural language prompt that will translate their domain expertise into YAML code for creating or editing Ansible Playbooks. Red Hat and IBM, however, will not automatically use the code from an organization to fine-tune their AI model without express consent.

    Rich Henshall, director of product management for Red Hat Ansible, said as IT environments become more complex, it’s clear many are hitting a ceiling in terms of what can be automated using legacy custom scripts. Ansible Lightspeed IBM Watson Code Assistant, along with an event-driven capability, will make it much simpler to automate the management of IT environments at scale using a declarative framework, he added.

    Ansible, for example, can now receive events from third-party tools, determine next steps and consistently initiate an automated response using Ansible playbooks. Ansible can also consume events from third-party monitoring, observability and IT analytics tools from providers such as Cisco ThousandEyes, CyberArk, Dynatrace, F5, IBM Instana, IBM Turbonomic, Palo Alto Networks and Zabbix with more to come, noted Henshall. Red Hat is also making available supplementary content for Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Insights, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and ServiceNow, in addition to enabling IT teams to create their own custom integrations.

    At this juncture, it’s not clear why more IT processes have not been automated using Ansible or other frameworks. Many DevOps teams continue to rely on custom scripts that typically don’t scale and are generally poorly documented. Any time the individual who wrote those scripts leaves an organization, it’s incredibly difficult—if not impossible—for the original scripts to be maintained, noted Henshall.

    One way or another, it’s clear that a more scalable approach to IT automation is required, especially with the rise of more complex cloud-native application environments. It’s no longer economically viable for most organizations to rely on legacy processes that require a small army of IT professionals to maintain.

  • Red Hat Moves to Secure Software Supply Chains

    Red Hat Moves to Secure Software Supply Chains

    Red Hat today announced a portfolio of cloud services designed to better secure software supply chains. The expanded portfolio includes Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline to secure continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows and Red Hat Trusted Content offerings to better secure software components.

    Announced at the Red Hat Summit, the Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain combines a suite of curated open source tools into a cloud service managed by Red Hat. The Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline service is based on sigstore, an emerging de facto standard for cryptographically signing code to ensure immutability that Red Hat helped drive, while Red Hat Trusted Content provides access to a set of software components that Red Hat has vetted.

    Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain also provides access to existing tools such as Quay, a registry for containers, and the Advanced Cluster Security (ACS) platform for securing Kubernetes clusters.

    Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain is scheduled to be made available in preview in the next few weeks, and will also track the provenance of components. In addition, the service will monitor emerging threats to software components and alert users of new and emerging risks. The service will also surface recommendations for remediating vulnerabilities it identifies based on best practices defined by Red Hat.

    Finally, Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline also promises to make it simpler to automate the deployment of secure code with a few clicks within the context of an integrated continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. DevOps team can also import Git repositories and configure container-native continuous build, test and deployment pipelines, inspect source code and transitive dependencies, autogenerate software bill of materials (SBOMs) within builds and verify and promote container images. An enterprise contract policy engine can consistently enforce compliance with the Supply Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) framework.

    Finding ways to implement DevSecOps workflows is a major challenge for any organization. Red Hat is making a case for a managed cloud service based on a collection of security software and services that a DevOps team would otherwise have to implement themselves.

    Tasked with securing increasingly complex software development environments, it’s not clear whether DevOps teams will opt to rely on a cloud service, but given the general lack of security expertise among software development teams, the fastest way to secure a software supply chain for most organizations is to rely on a service.

    Regardless of approach, of course, DevSecOps will soon become a standard element of application development workflows. Once that occurs, it’s not clear whether DevOps will simply become DevSecOps or whether security will be assumed to be an integrated element of any set of DevOps best practices.

    Sarwar Raza, vice president and general manager for cloud services at Red Hat, said regardless of approach, it’s clear that implicit trust is no longer good enough. Organizations of all sizes will need to be able to demonstrate that they have maintained a chain of custody for the software components used to build an application, he noted.

    One way or another, the overall security of downstream applications should eventually improve as the processes used to construct software are increasingly locked down.

  • Red Hat Extends Scope of Ansible Tools

    Red Hat Extends Scope of Ansible Tools

    Red Hat today announced it has extended the analytics capabilities it makes available for instances of the Ansible IT automation platform and has made the Ansible Automation Services Catalog now generally available.

    In addition, Red Hat has increased the number of certified playbooks it makes available from both the company and third-party partners within the Ansible Content Collections. That repository now houses more than 1,200 certified Ansible Modules.

    Announced prior to the Red Hat Summit, which is taking place online this week, these offerings are part of a series of cloud services the company has developed to foster the adoption of Ansible to automate a wide range of processes.

    Tom Anderson, vice president for the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform at Red Hat, said that as Ansible is employed to automate more IT processes, more IT teams want to better understand how the playbooks being created using Ansible are being used within their organizations. The latest updates to the Ansible Analytics module add the ability to filter analysis by Red Hat Ansible Tower cluster, by date and between organizations. IT teams can also discover job statistics by total runs, total time, average time, success rate, most failed tasks and the failure percentage of that task.

    At the same time, the Ansible Services Catalog makes it easier to access curated playbooks that have been vetted thoroughly, he said.

    Anderson noted Ansible continues to gain traction because it provides a declarative approach to automating IT processes that can span multiple platforms. Interest in automation has increased substantially in the last several years. The challenge that many organizations now face is that as various providers of platforms have made IT automation tools available, organizations now are managing multiple islands of automation, he said, adding Ansible provides a means to unify IT automation under a common open source framework.

    The pace at which organizations have been automating the management of IT is expected to increase substantially in the weeks and months ahead. In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations that are reducing IT staff will look to automate processes to enable the remaining IT employees to manage more efficiently IT environments that continue to grow in size and complexity.

    That increased reliance on automation should also advance adoption of best DevOps practices, as more IT operations teams embrace managing IT infrastructure as code.

    Ansible, of course, is not the only platform capable of automating IT processes. However, because of its reliance on a declarative approach, Ansible is more accessible to IT operations staff who lack programming skills. In theory, DevOps teams are increasingly taking control over the management of IT infrastructure using programmatic tools. However, there are still many IT organizations that prefer to have access to IT infrastructure centrally managed by IT operations teams that typically make resources available to developers via a self-service portal. However, while there may be a debate over who will automate IT processes, the one thing everyone does agree on is the time to do so is now more than ever.

  • Open source and Samsung take center stage at Red Hat Summit

    Open source and Samsung take center stage at Red Hat Summit

    While much of the DevOps world was focused on DockerCon in San Francisco this week, there was also big news happening on the east coast. While DockerCon was shaking things up with the announcement of the Open Container Project the Red Hat Summit in Boston held its own share of big news and much of it spotlighted the important role of open source.

    “Red Hat is really the independent voice of Linux focused entirely on business,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group. “It is also a showcase of how to make money on the platform without taking advantage of anyone in the process and largely remaining true to the core tenets that created Linux in the first place.”

    Focus on Open Source

    One of the primary core tenets—if not the defining core tenet—of Linux is open source. The shared development and collaborative nature of the operating system as an open source project is its main strength. At the Red Hat Summit open source played an even larger role than normal.

    “The company continues to show strong momentum for OpenShift Commons as the re-write of the technology is moving forward showing that the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) battles are alive and well,” explained Al Hilwa, program director of software development research for IDC. “Red Hat also rebranded and updated its FeedHenry platform as it continues to turn it fully into open source and integrate it with OpenShift.”

    Samsung Partnership

    Aside from the focus on open source, the other big news out of the Red Hat Summit was a new strategic alliance with Samsung. Samsung will push Red Hat’s mobile platform and potentially other software into the enterprise in a more integrated fashion as a function of the new partnership.

    The relationship has potential, but according to Enderle there are both positive and negative outcomes possible. “Samsung needs Red Hat far more than Red Hat needs Samsung because Red Hat provided the enterprise brand that Samsung needs to penetrate the space. Samsung is a firm that has never found a platform they didn’t like and have historically been unable to focus on any one of them for extended periods of time,” cautions Enderle. “Red Hat alone won’t be able to fix that and Samsung’s behavior could actually tarnish Red Hat if they aren’t careful.”

    Strong Momentum

    Hilwa also made another observation about the strength of Red Hat’s business model. “That the company will cruise through the two billion dollar annual revenue barrier sometime this year is all but certain with its posted rates of growth. This is an enormous milestone for the open source world.”

    We’ll have to wait and see how the Red Hat / Samsung partnership pans out for either company, but the Red Hat Summit highlighted the strength of Red Hat’s momentum and the unstoppable juggernaut of open source development.