Red Hat Summit 2025: Open Source Stakes Claim in Production AIRed Hat Summit 2025: Open Source Stakes Claim in Production AI

Like every other major IT vendor, enterprise Linux provider Red Hat is all in on AI.

At Red Hat Summit 2025 in Boston last week, the open source giant unveiled a comprehensive strategy to bridge traditional IT operations with AI capabilities. The company is positioning itself as the foundation for enterprise AI deployment across hybrid cloud environments.

The announcements span Red Hat's traditional software products and a series of new efforts all designed to help enterprises benefit from AI.

Key Announcements from Red Hat Summit 2025

Red Hat made the following announcements at this year's summit:

"While this might feel new for many of us, this isn't the first time we've experienced this in software. In fact, when open source emerged, there were a lot of people that felt the same way about it," Matt Hicks, Red Hat's CEO, commented about AI during his opening keynote. "I believe we can't afford to overlook the similarities. Open source at its core removed barriers. It didn't matter where you went to school. … It just unlocked human potential worldwide."

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RHEL 10: The Most Significant Linux Evolution in Years

Red Hat Summit has long been the place where the company has announced a new edition of its flagship enterprise Linux platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10) is different from its predecessors in that it is focused not just on traditional enterprise workloads, but also on the emerging needs of the AI era.

The cornerstone innovation in RHEL 10 is image mode, which applies container management principles to operating system deployment and lifecycle management. This approach treats the OS as an immutable image, fundamentally changing how administrators deploy, update, and maintain Linux systems at scale.

"With image mode, changes can be deployed or rolled back without using external snapshots. Image mode makes CVEs easier to manage, build pipelines easier to integrate, and problem resolution much simpler," said Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and chief product officer at Red Hat, during the keynote demonstration.

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Addressing the critical skills gap in Linux administration, RHEL 10 introduces RHEL Lightspeed, an AI assistant that integrates decades of Red Hat's Linux expertise with generative AI capabilities. The system provides context-aware guidance through natural language interfaces, helping both novice and experienced administrators manage complex Linux environments more efficiently.

RHEL 10 also introduces improvements to Red Hat Insights, the platform's predictive analytics and management service. New capabilities include AI-powered package recommendations and enhanced planning features that provide comprehensive views of the RHEL roadmap and lifecycle.

From vLLM to Production: Red Hat AI Inference Server

Central to Red Hat's AI strategy is addressing the fundamental challenge of deploying AI models efficiently in production environments. This effort centers on vLLM, an open source inference server that has rapidly become the de facto standard for large language model serving since its origin at UC Berkeley in 2023.

In January, Red Hat acquired AI inference vendor Neural Magic. Through the Neural Magic acquisition, Red Hat has integrated advanced model optimization techniques that can increase token throughput by two to four times while maintaining model accuracy.

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Building on this vLLM foundation, the new Red Hat AI Inference Server is a fully supported container that gives users the ability to serve models anywhere on any hardware. The enterprise-grade offering includes:

OpenShift Lightspeed: AI-Powered Kubernetes Management

At the event, Red Hat announced the general availability of OpenShift Lightspeed, a generative AI assistant integrated directly into the OpenShift console. The tool addresses a critical challenge facing organizations: the widening skills gap in managing complex Kubernetes environments as they scale AI and container workloads.

"Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed helps flatten the learning curve for Red Hat OpenShift users, enabling novices to get started more quickly and more experienced users to maximize efficiencies on the industry's leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes," explained Mike Barrett, vice president of Hybrid Platforms at Red Hat.

The AI assistant provides intelligent guidance through natural language interfaces, offering step-by-step assistance directly within the OpenShift web console. Users can ask questions about OpenShift operations, troubleshooting, and cluster resource management, with the system providing context-aware responses based on Red Hat's extensive operational knowledge.

Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite: Platform Engineering Meets AI

The new Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite represents a comprehensive approach to modernizing application development workflows while integrating AI capabilities and enhanced security controls. The new offering, available July 1, combines platform engineering principles with AI-native development tools.

The suite integrates three primary components designed to accelerate development while maintaining enterprise security standards:

Red Hat Developer Hub serves as an enterprise-grade internal developer portal built on the Backstage framework. The platform now features an enhanced AI-centric user experience with preconfigured software templates for common AI scenarios, including chatbots, audio-to-text processing, object detection, code generation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). These templates provide architectural patterns and best practices without requiring deep AI expertise.

Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer provides comprehensive management of software bill of materials (SBOMs), vulnerability exploitability exchanges (VEX), and common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).

Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer offers production-ready deployment of the Sigstore project for cryptographic signing and verification of software artifacts. Critically, the system extends signing and verification capabilities to AI models packaged in OCI format, ensuring only trusted and verified models reach production environments.

The suite enables platform engineering teams to create so-called golden paths. These paths are standardized software templates that transparently provide infrastructure, application services, toolchains, and best practice policies. This approach allows developers to deliver AI-enabled applications faster while adhering to security, governance, and compliance requirements.

The platform integrates with existing Red Hat tools, including OpenShift Pipelines, OpenShift GitOps, and migration toolkits, enabling organizations to leverage existing investments while adding AI capabilities to their development workflows.

"The platforms and architectures that you have in place for hybrid cloud are evolving and adapting to be the foundation for genAI deployments," Chris Wright, Red Hat's CTO, said during the keynote. "Red Hat is enabling all of you to bring AI to the cloud platforms your businesses trust today."