Red Hat Summit & Ansible Fest 2023 Recap / Blogs / Perficient

Last week, our team attended Red Hat Summit, in Boston, MA.  This past event marks the first time Red Hat combined Ansible Fest with Red Hat Summit. During the three-day conference, Red Hat partners, clients, and vendors got together to hear from Red Hat leadership, industry experts, and get hands-on experience with Red Hat platforms. The Perficient team learned about new capabilities and technologies, heard new product announcements, and connected with peers and clients from across industries.

The stars of Ansible Fest at this year’s Red Hat Summit were undoubtedly the imminent general availability of Event Driven Ansible and the release of a developer plugin called Lightspeed which takes advantage of generative AI to help speed up automation development.

Event Driven Ansible

General availability for Event-Driven Ansible (EDA) is set to be included with the next version of Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) 2.4, which should be available for subscribers beginning in June of this year. So, right around the corner.

EDA introduces the concepts of rulebooks which define sources, rules, and actions to kick off automation. Where sources are things like metrics from an APM like Prometheus or Dynatrace, security events from a SIEM, changes to files, and so on. Rules are the conditions to act on from the source. Finally, actions are the defined automation tasks to carry out, like running a playbook or launching a job or workflow from AAP due to its close integration with the AAP controller.

Event-driven content is already being certified by Red Hat for the AAP 2.4 launch. More content will be released in the Automation hub as partners certify and release it.

Some Key Features of EDA within AAP:

• A new Event Driven Ansible Controller which runs the always-on EDA listeners. The controller will have a familiar user experience for existing users of Ansible Automation Platform.
• Tight integration with the Automation Controller to launch job and workflow templates when expected events are triggered.
• Event throttling, which allows developers and admins to constrain the number of events that can trigger actions.

Ansible Lightspeed

With Ansible expanding to include the new EDA rulebooks, it’s important to maintain development velocity and quality. Red Hat’s strategy to help is to provide a powerful new VS Code extension leveraging IBM Watson-based generative AI.

Formerly known as “Project Wisdom”, Red Hat will soon be providing a targeted generative AI plugin for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor. The demos presented in Boston last week were exciting. My take was that the plugin works like a slick combination of ChatGPT, intellisense, and tab-completion. If the final release is anything like the demos, developers will be able to prompt code generation with the name: block of an ansible task. Lightspeed will process for a moment and offer generated code complete with fully qualified collection names, parameters, and even variables inferred from vars blocks and imported vars files.

Lightspeed is still in a closed beta, so to get on the waiting list to try it out you’ll want to visit and make sure to include your GitHub ID.

For anyone concerned about being required to participate in the language model for Lightspeed, Red Hat made it a point to emphasize that the data collection for your ansible code will be an opt-in option, meaning data collection is off until explicitly turned on by you, the developer.

Interested in More Red Hat Summit Content?

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Perficient + Red Hat

Red Hat provides open-source technologies that enable strategic cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration solutions to make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments. As a Red Hat Premier Partner and a Red Hat Apex Partner, we help drive strategic initiatives around cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration to ensure successful application modernization and cloud implementations and migrations.