Several announcements headlined this week’s Red Hat Summit event, one of which was Ansible Lightspeed, an offshoot of last year’s Project Wisdom, geared toward the artificial intelligence-driven automation of IT workloads.

On the backend, Red Hat Inc. has also invested in improving the overall experience for Ansible developers, in addition to securing critical software supply chains.

“I think the fascination is in the progress we’ve made in areas you typically don’t expect Red Hat to be making announcements,” said Ashesh Badani (pictured), chief product officer of Red Hat. “For example, the developer experience area has been great. I’ve had customers come up to me and go, ‘I was so glad to hear you’re doing this work. Off of the Backstage project, we actually use it and now I can go off and start taking advantage of what Red Hat’s bringing to bear.'”

Badani spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Rob Strechay at Red Hat Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Red Hat Developer Hub and its intended value areas. (* Disclosure below.)

Undertaking the plumbing work

As one of the world’s foremost open-source enterprise software players, Red Hat undertakes extensive work at the foundational layer to streamline operations and remove redundancies for developers, engineers and data scientists.

“The ability for us to dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to start onboarding the application environments is huge,” Badani said. “Reducing something that takes weeks to only a few days, or something that takes multiple steps and lines of code to only a few clicks is our vision around that. Number two, once you’ve done that and are on the other end of it, you’re going to make sure you are generating things like software bill of materials.”

The Developer Hub is Red Hat’s enterprise-grade open developer platform that’s been created to reduce friction within engineering teams and bolster productivity. It came as a direct result of end-user demand, according to Badani.

“That idea came to us straight out of demand from our customers using Backstage,” he said. “In typical Red Hat fashion, we wanted to make sure we’re going in into the upstream community. In Backstage, we can now provide distribution and a set of plug-ins that’ll make it easier for customers to use a set of commonly asked tools from our customers, both within and outside the Red Hat Portfolio.”

While developer portals aren’t a novel concept, three qualities set Red Hat’s attempt apart: A single pane of glass to view available developer tools; self-service capabilities coupled with cloud-native application development guardrails; and adept security and governance across an enterprise.

As with other rollouts, such as Event-Driven Ansible and Lightspeed, the Developer Hub will go through a meticulous maturation period where customer feedback will guide continued development until general availability.

“We’ll go through a period of maturation with it, just like we’ve historically done with every open-source project. We’ll get customer feedback and input, take it through maturation and roll it out through to general availability,” Badani said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit:

(* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE