Open-source powerhouse Red Hat Inc. is offering OpenShift Virtualization on its artificial intelligence development platform to help customers with their virtual machine workloads.

The company has released a series of enhancements to its AI services, but according to Mike Barrett (pictured left), vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud platforms at Red Hat, customers are most eager to find hybrid solutions for their traditional VMs.

Red Hat’s Mike Barrett and Ju Lim discuss modernizing VM workloads.

“March of 2024, the customer base just wanted to migrate,” he said. “They didn’t want to talk about modernization. They wanted to talk about getting off their legacy virtualization platform as quickly as possible. And it changed everything we were doing at the beginning of the year. It really made us focus on putting features into the product.”

Barrett and Ju Lim (right), senior manager of OpenShift product management and distinguished engineer at Red Hat, spoke with theCUBE Research’s Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Red Hat is innovating with OpenShift Virtualization and its newest open-source offerings. (* Disclosure below.)

Innovation on OpenShift Virtualization and Lightspeed platforms

The updates are coming thick and fast for Red Hat’s OpenShift platform, including features that help prevent bias in AI models and a new data drift detection monitor. Red Hat has also released a tech preview of the OpenShift Lightspeed platform, which further integrates AI into customer workloads.

“We added a whole bunch of features for OpenShift virtualization, things like memory over subscriptions so you can have higher density for … VM workloads in particular,” Lim said. “We’re also looking to offer this on the hybrid cloud, obviously, so today we offer OpenShift Virtualization on bare metal on AWS. We also recently added it to our managed Red Hat OpenShift on AWS service.”

Even as Red Hat continues to quickly innovate, the company has an eye toward security. Regulations, such as the Digital Operational Resistance Act, are demanding that software companies provide greater protection for its customers. Red Hat has responded by introducing user-defined networks to more effectively isolate customer information.

“Security really exploded this year in terms of compliance standards, regulatory assignments and different vertical markets,” Barrett said. “Typically, we would isolate in Kubernetes at the namespace or at the cluster boundary. So, we had to make that very inexpensive and automated for people to make that choice between a cluster boundary or a namespace boundary.”

Red Hat has many open-source projects focused on harnessing the power of generative AI and containerization, including Konveyor AI, which migrates platforms to the cloud. Lim predicts that over the next few years, customers will want more specialized models for different industries.

“You’re going to see a lot of smaller models out there,” she said. “We’re going to start to see more of it at the edge. I think a lot of what we see will just be sort of exploding in a lot of different segments, a lot of different industries. I think it’s just really exciting times that we live in today.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA:

(* 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