Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023

Back in May, several members of the Arctiq Team traveled to Boston to attend Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023. This year, the two events came together for the first time, sharing the same venue. Over the past decade, AnsibleFest has evolved into a multi-day experience, drawing thousands of attendees as the leading IT automation technology event. By merging with Red Hat Summit, attendees gained access to a larger open-source stage and were able to experience the entire Red Hat technology portfolio as part of a single event, offering enhanced networking opportunities, expert insights, and exposure to cutting-edge technologies. It was great to be able to check out what’s next in infrastructure, app development, edge computing, cloud services, and other enterprise IT essentials in a single place!

The event was a whirlwind of solid announcements, thought-provoking conversations, and a sea of both new and familiar faces. Among the standout themes were event-driven Ansible and the transformative potential of generative AI within the Red Hat ecosystem.

With 331 sessions packed into three days, Summit covered an incredible range of topics—too vast to fully encapsulate in our recap. Nonetheless, one highlight for Michael Kennedy, our VP of Solutions Architecture, was the focus on sustainability:

“This is my first Red Hat Summit post-Covid and it’s really exciting to be back! I love the activity and the energy here. It’s great seeing people continue to derive value out of open source solutions, and there’s a lot of talk about really interesting things. I’ve really enjoyed the discussion around sustainability and using Red Hat’s Kepler for understanding your energy usage within your Kubernetes platform. We’ve always had an interest in sustainability at Arctiq. It’s not a focal point of our practice, but when customers have sustainability goals, we love to talk to them about the possible solutions there are - we always welcome the conversation on that topic! Most of our sustainability discussion so far have been about ephemeral environments in development, such as having pipelines that stand up the test environments and then shut them down once the testing is done. That adds to the sustainability story for a lot of customers.”

To learn more about how the Kepler project is working to advance environmentally-conscious efforts, check out Huamin Chen’s blog.

Arctiq also hosted an in-person recap event in our office, for the Toronto community in July. We were joined by Aren De Jong, Senior Technical Product Manager at Red Hat, for a talk on Red Hat Managed OpenShift Roadmap. He delved into the exciting future plans and advancements of Red Hat's cloud services, featuring ROSA, OSD, and ARO.

We concluded the event with a session presented by Patrick Toal, Sr. Solutions Architect - Automation Specialist at Red Hat, and Anshul Behl, Principal Technical Marketing Manager at Red Hat. They dove into the highlights of AnsibleFest, with a focus on the transformative power of Lightspeed and Event-Driven Architecture. They explored how attendees could elevate their automation strategy beyond the confines of task-based automation. They talked about Red Hat's comprehensive Automation Platform that includes tools to codify processes with AI assistance (Lightspeed), Event-Driven, decision-based automation triggers, and validated content, to help implement more automation, faster.

If you missed any of the action from Red Hat Summit 2023, replays of this year’s keynotes and more can be found within Red Hat’s virtual content hub through November.

We look forward to attending Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2024, taking place on May 6-9, 2024 in Denver, Colorado!