Enterprise software giant Red Hat Inc. delivered a flurry of announcements today at this year’s Kubecon + CloudNativeCon NA event, detailing its vision for artificial intelligence and a key update to the Red Hat OpenShift container software development suite.

Kubecon + CloudNativeCon NA is an annual event focused on the popular, open-source Kubernetes technology that’s used by developers to build containerized applications that can run on any platform. The rise of AI is one of the hottest topics at the event, as Kubernetes plays a key role in enabling machine learning operations or MLOps, a critical element of AI development.

Red Hat didn’t mention any specific product announcements, but instead took the opportunity to spell out its vision for AI. It stressed that businesses need to prioritize implementing AI in a strategic, holistic and timely manner, and consider how it can be used to solve complex problems across every area of their business, especially in regard to challenges involving security and privacy.

The company explained that if organizations want to use AI effectively, they need to be able to combine numerous technologies to operationalize AI use cases from ideation to production. The goal of every enterprise, it said, should be to use AI to drive agility and efficiency within their existing teams, tools and processes. Red Hat said its vision is to help companies do this by combining the collaborative nature of open source technologies with the power of AI.

Besides talking about AI, Red Hat announced a key update to its Red Hat Openshift platform. Red Hat OpenShift is one of the most popular commercial distributions of Kubernetes, designed to simplify the infrastructure complexities of application development. With the Red Hat OpenShift 4.14 release, the company said it’s announcing the general availability of new features including hosted control planes on bare metal servers and Red Hat Virtualization. With that, it’s providing organizations with more flexibility on how and where they can run the OpenShift platform, while boosting security to help mitigate risks and meet compliance requirements.

The company also announced general availability of Red Hat Device Edge, which is a fully supported, enterprise-ready distribution of the open-source MicroShift platform – a lightweight Kubernetes distribution based on the edge capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift.

Red Hat Device Edge provides the infrastructure required to build and run edge devices such as drones, internet of things gateways, points of sale and in-vehicle systems that can consume data where it’s generated. By running these applications at the edge, developers can ensure greater responsiveness and a better user experience. With general availability, Red Hat Device Edge can now take advantage of Red Hat Ansible Automation to deliver more consistent Day 1 and Day 2 management of thousands of edge devices and sites, the company said.

Finally, Red Hat said it’s expanding its contributions to the Backstage community. Backstage is an open-source platform that serves as a developer portal for all the tooling, services, and documentation within an organization. It’s designed to be a unifying interface for both developers and operations engineers, providing a centralized location for managing various aspects of software development and infrastructure.

Red Hat said it’s donating a number of new back-end plugins to Backstage, saying these will make it simpler for developers to integrate its platforms and technologies into their existing application development pipelines. The company said the contribution builds on the list of plug-ins already donated to the community by Red Hat, aimed at helping users get the most out of Backstage implementations.

Image: Red Hat