IBM Corp.’s Red Hat Inc. subsidiary today is kicking off its annual Red Hat Summit conference with the themes of “do more with less” and “scale for innovation” and a raft of enhancements to its core products that address both.

It wouldn’t be 2023 if there weren’t an artificial intelligence angle, and Red Hat OpenShift AI is the headliner this year. Billed as a “standardized platform for creating production AI/ML models,” the software takes advantage of native graphics processing unit acceleration features and can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud with the same tooling and interfaces.

New enhancements include deployment pipelines for experiment tracking and automated machine learning workflows, GPU support for inference and custom model serving runtimes, model monitoring from a centralized dashboard and bias detection during training.

There are several optional technology partner offerings, including the commercial edition of Anaconda Inc.’s Python development platform, IBM Watson Studio, Intel Corp.’s OpenVINO deep learning and AI Analytics Toolkits,  Pachyderm pipelines and Starburst Data Inc.’s Galaxy data lake analytics platform. It also provides access to 30 additional AI and machine learning-certified partners through the OpenShift ecosystem.

Cross-cloud interconnection

Developers are getting relief from the need to build complex network pipelines with Red Hat Service Interconnect, which is based on the Skupper.io layer 7 service interconnect for Kubernetes clusters. Red Hat said Service Interconnect enables developers to create trusted connections between services, applications and workloads across on-premises and multicloud environments without having to configure networks or security privileges.

Developers can use the service to add trusted, resilient connectivity between applications running on any Kubernetes cluster, virtual machine or bare-metal host in the cloud, data center or at the edge. There is no need for elevated privileges or advanced networking skills and the service reduces downtime by allowing application connections to be migrated transparently between source and destination platforms.

Simpler Linux management

Also in the domain of doing more with less, Red Hat is expanding the management capabilities of its Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux software, which continuously analyzes platforms and applications across hybrid cloud environments. The enhancements are part of a broader initiative to make RHEL more accessible, manageable and maintainable, the company said.

The browser-based utility consolidates RHEL deployments across a hybrid cloud into a single console and uses predictive analytics to detect potential bugs, misconfigurations or security vulnerabilities, the company said. Information technology operators can use the service to fix security vulnerabilities and bugs more quickly without the need for Red Hat Satellite Server and to act on server groups simultaneously using patch templates.

Fixes can be pushed from one location without the need to use a command line or have a deep understanding of Linux administration. Red Hat said Insights can help IT organizations spot issues up to 90% faster and remediate them nearly 66% faster while making Linux administration accessible to a wider audience, the company said. The included image builder service also makes it easier for administrators to build standardized, optimized operating system images.

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