Red Hat seeks to shrink IT skills gap with Lightspeed gen AI

For IT leaders experiencing skills gaps in the data center and cloud, Red Hat believes it may have an answer.

At Red Hat Summit 2024 in Denver today, the company announced plans to extend its Red Hat Lightspeed generative AI capabilities across all its platforms, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). By infusing gen AI functionality across its portfolio, Red Hat aims to reduce the complexity of enterprise IT and help platform engineers and developers be more accurate and efficient — in turn giving them more freedom to drive IT innovation.

Chuck Dubuque, senior director of product marketing for Red Hat OpenShift, said OpenShift Lightspeed will be available in technology preview later this year, while RHEL Lightspeed is currently in the planning stages. Red Hat said it will offer more information on RHEL Lightspeed availability soon. Enhancements to Ansible Lightspeed are generally available now.

Lightspeed to hit OpenShift

Red Hat first introduced Lightspeed last year in Red Hat Ansible, its automation platform. Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed integrated the IBM watsonx Code Assistant, a gen AI service designed to support platform engineers and developers by accepting natural language prompts from which it produces code recommendations built on Ansible best practices.

“Hundreds of customers today are using it to generate tasks and we’re continuing to improve that, expanding it today to be able to build full playbooks and offering things like on-prem capabilities,” Dubuque said.

Red hat announced refinements to the Ansible Lightspeed service today that make the code recommendations more relevant, including:

• Model customization/tuning. Users can now use their existing Ansible content with the IBM watsonx Code Assistant to train the model. Code recommendations tailored to an organization’s specific needs and automation patterns can improve the quality and accuracy of Ansible content.
• Administrative dashboard. A new administrative dashboard provides account administrators with telemetry data around Ansible Lightspeed usage, including monitoring metrics for gen AI requests and insights into how end users are using the service.

OpenShift is Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes container platform for deploying applications at scale. Red Hat said that among other scenarios, OpenShift Lightspeed will come into its own when a cluster is at capacity. For example, it could suggest the user enable autoscaling, and, by assessing that the clusters are hosted on a public cloud, suggest an appropriate size for the new instance. By assessing usage patterns, it could offer to auto-scale down once capacity requirements decrease. It could also recommend using GitOps to save the configuration across clusters.

“The goal here is very similar to what we’ve already delivered with Ansible Lightspeed: to provide a generative AI assistant integrated into the OpenShift web console so users can use simple language to get answers related to OpenShift and all of the other pieces of technology that are associated with an OpenShift subscription,” Dubuque said.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux up next

Red Hat’s plan for RHEL Lightspeed is to simplify how the IT function deploys, manages, and maintains Linux environments even as systems and their complexity scale. The gen AI assistant is intended to help both novice admins and seasoned operations teams more quickly get answers to common questions and solve emerging problems.

For example, Red Hat said if a new Common Vulnerability and Exploit (CVE) were announced, RHEL Lightspeed could flag an admin that a Red Hat Security Advisory (RHSA) had been released with fixes. It could then alert the user that affected machines were in production and should not be taken down, but updates could be applied to affected development and staging systems. Then it could help the user schedule patching for the next production maintenance window. Red Hat notes that it could offer all these capabilities through simple commands, even if the user has limited command-line knowledge.

Red Hat joins a range of enterprise IT vendors adding generative AI capabilities to their offerings. Research firm Gartner recently predicted that generative AI will help spur increases in IT spending worldwide, but not all organizations are looking to increase budgets to make use of new gen AI features, especially with payoff in question.

In announcing Lightspeed’s extension, Red Hat’s Dubuque acknowledged this bind.

“We’re all very excited about AI but we also have heard from our customers they have flat budgets,” Dubuque said. “They have challenges with infrastructure costs continuing to climb, and we want to offer easy ways not just to adopt our technology but also make it more efficient to use Ansible for better automation, to help customers who may be moving from traditional virtualization into OpenShift virtualization and containers, to be able to do that with fewer resources than they’ve had in the past.”