RedHat Connect 2025 Dübendorf: Containers, Automation, and AI

Today, I had the pleasure of attending the RedHat Connect 2025 event in Dübendorf, a stone's throw away from Zurich. After introductory speeches by Richard Zobrist and Leonard Bodmer came a presentation by Chris Wright, CTO of Red Hat, presenting on "Red Hat's Vision for AI and Open Source," which was particularly enlightening. Red Hat, renowned for its OpenShift platform for container hosting and Ansible for automation, also aims to become an “innovation” company, which is more or less a synonym for doing something with AI today. Their AI strategy seems to be quite like Microsoft's "Co-Pilot" approach: enhance all products with AI, bet it will improve automation, and/or boost developer productivity.

Regarding AI, Red Hat has a refreshing alternative to the offerings of major cloud providers. The cloud providers push their proprietary AI models and AI-based cloud services. In contrast, Red Hat helps integrate "smaller" Language Learning Models (LLMs) that developers can run on laptops. Here, we see a commoditization of LLM models – everything needed is there for free. ?Red Hat's "Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI" is a testament to this approach. It includes:

• Certain Granite LLMs released by IBM to the public
• Instruction Labs for enhancing LLMs with customer-specific data and information
• Open-source AI tools, and
• a Linux optimized for AI workloads.

In addition, Red Hat proposes the usage of Ansible for automating AI and ML workflows, has the Lightspeed tool for generating quick scripts thanks to Gen-AI support, and, thanks to Red Hat's recent acquisition, Network Magic, wants to improve AI training engines.

This more conceptual presentation was then followed by a concrete demo by Marcel Haerri, which showed some tools in action.

Other key learnings from presentations this morning include:

• Red Hat is expanding its offerings to support more workloads, such as VMs in addition to containers. The company not only sells the technology but also provides assessments for potential customers considering migration to Red Hat, assists with migration, and offers IT consulting around their product technology, as Stefanie Chiras shared.

• Open source and the Swiss government: Open-sourcing the code becomes a criterion when the government selects vendors. This plays a role in a big tender for a cloud where, for example, a priority is given to non-proprietary tooling and Swiss technologies/providers, as Matthias Stürmer highlighted.
• Red Hat workloads are substantial within Azure. While I was unaware, various Azure services heavily utilize Red Hat technology, not just the Linux VMs on Azure, as Roy de Milde's presentation revealed.

Unfortunately, I had to leave before lunch, so I could sadly not listen to the more technical presentations in the afternoon…