Red Hat's new OpenShift delivers AI, edge and security enhancements

SALT LAKE CITY – At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024, Red Hat announced more updates to its OpenShift Kubernetes platform than you can shake a stick at. Most focused on AI integration, edge computing, and enhanced security features. Here, without further ado, are OpenShift’s crème de la crème.

First up, Red Hat introduced OpenShift 4.17. This latest version of Red Hat’s Kubernetes distribution is designed to accelerate innovation across hybrid cloud environments without compromising security and compliance requirements. Key enhancements include:

Also: The best open-source AI models: All your free-to-use options explained

• Improved virtualization management with OpenShift Virtualization, featuring safe memory oversubscription and dynamic workload rebalancing
• Enhanced security features, including native network isolation for namespaces and a Confidential Compute Attestation Operator
• Advanced Kubernetes management capabilities for managing virtual machines across multiple clusters

Red Hat — along with everyone else — is doubling down on AI integration with several announcements:

• OpenShift Lightspeed: This new AI-powered virtual assistant for OpenShift, currently in technology preview, is designed to assist with tasks like troubleshooting applications and investigating cluster resources. My early look at Lightspeed revealed it to be the rarest of things:  A truly useful AI assistant. 
• OpenShift AI 2.15: Set to release later this month, it introduces a new model registry for managing AI models, data drift detection for maintaining model reliability, and integration with Nvidia’s NIM microservices for easier deployment of large language models.
• AI-enabled application development templates: Red Hat Developer Hub now offers five new templates for common AI use cases, including audio transcription, chatbots, and object detection.

To improve its AI backroom development, Red Hat announced an agreement to acquire Neural Magic, a company specializing in generative AI inference workloads.

Of course, AI is nothing without fast hardware support. So it’s no surprise that Red Hat announced expanded support for Nvidia hardware, including the tech preview of Red Hat Device Edge on the Nvidia Jetson Orin and Nvidia IGX Orin platforms.

Thinking of the edge, Red Hat Device Edge 4.17 was unveiled. Focused on enhancing low-latency and AI-edge workloads, this update aims to modernize time-critical workloads in remote and distributed locations, supporting use cases with latency requirements below one millisecond.

Also: Open source fights back: ‘We won’t get patent-trolled again’

In short, as Joe Fernandes, VP and GM of Red Hat’s AI business unit, said, “We’re offering significant improvements in scalability, performance, and operational efficiency… making it possible for IT organizations to gain the benefits of a powerful AI platform while maintaining the ability to build, deploy and run on whatever environment their unique business needs dictate.”

Red Hat is far from alone with its new and improved Kubernetes release. New Kubernetes software updates are as thick as fleas on a fat pup at the 9,000-plus attendees’ KubeCon. That said, though, Red Hat continues to improve its cloud-native products at a remarkable clip.