Red Hat Launches RHEL 10 With New Capabilities For Hybrid Cloud And AI Systems

At this week’s Red Hat Summit, the open systems software giant also debuted new AI inferencing and software development tools that the company said will make it easier to build, deploy and manage AI applications at scale across hybrid ecosystems.

Red Hat today unveiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, the newest edition of the company’s distribution of the popular Linux operating system with new capabilities that the company says meet the demands of today’s hybrid cloud environments and AI systems and even protect against cybersecurity threats of the future.

Red Hat, which is holding its annual Red Hat Summit in Boston this week, also debuted Red Hat AI Inference Server for delivering AI inferencing capabilities across hybrid cloud systems, Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite to accelerate and simplify application development on the Red Hat OpenShift hybrid cloud application platform, and Red Hat Edge Manager for managing fleets of devices.

Company executives, in a Summit pre-briefing for the press, emphasized that bringing open-source AI to enterprise customers is a key theme of this week’s conference.

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“The theme of our AI news at Summit is really around enabling any model across any hardware accelerator in any hybrid cloud environment,” said Joe Fernandez, vice president and general manager of the Red Hat AI Business Unit, during the call.

“What we’re trying to do is provide an enterprise AI platform that spans the hybrid cloud, whether you’re running in the data center, across any of the major public clouds, or even out at the edge,” he said. “We’re extending that to also enable hybrid across a different, diverse hardware footprint, whether it’s Nvidia devices, AMD, Intel, Google, AWS and more.”

Red Hat refers to the newest edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as “more than just an iteration” of the company’s distribution of Linux with new capabilities that meet the demands of today’s hybrid cloud environments and AI systems.

“As enterprise IT grapples with the proliferation of hybrid environments and the imperative to integrate AI workloads, the need for an intelligent, resilient and durable operating system has never been greater,” Red Hat said in the RHEL 10 announcement. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 rises to this challenge, delivering a platform engineered for agility, flexibility and manageability, all while retaining a strong security posture against the software threats of the future.”

Organizations are struggling to hire the Linux skill sets they need to manage their distributed Linux systems, according to Red Hat. RHEL 10 introduces Lightspeed, an AI-powered management capability that integrates generative AI into the RHEL 10 platform to provide context-aware guidance and actionable recommendations, through a natural language interface, to assist with tasks from troubleshooting common issues to best practices for managing complex IT estates, according to the company.

RHEL 10 offers enhanced security features in anticipation of long-term cybersecurity threats from quantum computing. The operating system integrates Federal Information Processing Standards compliance for post-quantum cryptography to help organizations better defend against future “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, according to Red Hat.

A new image mode in RHEL 10 provides a container-native approach for building, deploying and managing both the operating system and applications within a single, streamlined workflow. That makes it possible to manage an entire IT landscape, from the underlying platform to containerized applications, using the same consistent tools and techniques.

And Red Hat Insights, which provides system management capabilities for hybrid cloud deployments of RHEL, OpenShift and other Red Hat software, now includes AI-powered package recommendations and optimized planning capabilities for RHEL.

Red Hat is also now offering pre-tuned, fully supported, and ready-to-run RHEL images for AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 is now generally available through the Red Hat Customer Portal.

New RHEL 10, AI Tools Create Partner Opportunities

Red Hat executives said RHEL 10 and its new AI capabilities create new opportunities for the company’s channel partners.

RHEL 10 “gives partners a chance to engage with customers on a whole new level with everything we’re doing,” said Raj Das, senior director of product management – Core RHEL Platform, during the pre-briefing.

“It gives them selling opportunities with respect to container-based image mode, immutable container-based deployments. It gives them something to talk to customers about how they can effectively increase their efficiency by having the same number of system administrators manage more systems now because of RHEL Lightspeed. It gives them new opportunities for new business that they can go hunt with respect to post-quantum cryptography,” Das said.

“Our system integrator and services partners have been helping customers develop [and] deliver enterprise Linux platforms for a long time,” Fernandez said. “We then evolved that into also offering cloud native platforms, container platforms with OpenShift. And certainly we plan to extend that with our AI platforms.”

“As a platform provider, we know that AI is the next set of workloads that customers need to deploy. Ultimately, those AI models will run together with applications on Linux managed by Kubernetes, but will require new capabilities, like we talked about today. So for us, this is the next evolution of our platform. And I think it’s definitely our plan to continue working with our service provider partners and consultancies, as well as new partners, who are looking to bring those solutions to customers,” Fernandez said.

Red Hat said it has also made it easier for hardware and software partners to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 with the availability of what it calls “partner-validated products” within the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. Those products are tested based on partner’s own criteria and methodologies to verify they work with RHEL 10.

New AI Inference Server, Developer Tools

Other new technology launches included Red Hat Inference Server, part of the Red Hat AI platform that launched at Red Hat Summit last year. Red Hat said Inference Server marks a “significant step towards democratizing generative AI across the hybrid cloud” by making it possible to run any generative AI model on any AI accelerator in any cloud environment.

Red Hat Inference Server, which can be deployed standalone or as a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI includes technology from the vLLM community project enhanced by Red Hat’s own Neural Magic technology.

Red Hat also unveiled Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite, an addition to Red Hat OpenShift – the Kubernetes-based hybrid cloud application platform – to accelerate and simplify application development tasks. The new offering is designed to improve developer productivity and application security and help speed the adoption of Red Hat AI technologies.

Red Hat also announced the general availability of OpenShift Lightspeed, a generative AI-based virtual assistant integrated into OpenShift, to help organizations manage their application platform deployments across hybrid clouds.

And the company debuted a technology preview of Red Hat Edge Manager for managing fleets of edge devices at scale, such as retail point-of-sale systems or industrial machinery on factory floors. Red Hat said the new software streamlines the deployment and management of edge-computing infrastructure and applications, using a single console, and provides end-to-end security capabilities.