Red Hat is putting artificial intelligence (AI) to work in IT operations and event remediation, showing the technology is good for more than designing novelty socks or creating an endless Seinfeld parody.
At the Red Hat Summit in Boston Tuesday, Red Hat introduced Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant, which uses generative AI to automate server configuration. The company also debuted Event-Driven Ansible, which uses automation to reduce service disruptions.
Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant lets IT engineers use plain English to generate YAML code for creating or editing Ansible Playbooks. These provide instructions for repeatable, re-usable simple configuration and multi-machine deployment for rolling out complex applications. Ansible Lightspeed will let IT staff generate playbooks in seconds.
“It’s a great use of AI,” IDC analyst Jevin Jensen told Silverlinings. “It’s going to be a tremendous productivity and efficiency gain for automation.” He continued: “You couldn’t type YAML Playbooks that fast even if you had all the parameters memorized or had them written down.”
The automation tools are designed to help organizations mitigate the IT skills shortage. Some 90% of global organizations will experience IT skills crisis by 2025, Red Hat said, citing an IDC report. The skills shortage will constrain revenue for organizations that fail to address the challenge. But organizations that invest in automation will see a 40% productivity increase by 2025.
Competition for the Ansible Lightspeed service includes Hashicorp Terraform and VMware, though Red Hat also cooperates with those companies, Jensen said.
Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant will be available later this year.
Automating Events
Meanwhile, Event-Driven Ansible works with third-party observability tools from partners, including Cisco ThousandEyes and F5, Palo Alto Networks, and more, to automate so-called “Day 2 operations.” Red Hat talks about three stages of infrastructure: Day 0 is design and planning, Day 1 is deployment and Day 2 is ongoing operations.
Event-Driven Ansible tracks events, determines next steps and acts automatically to mitigate potential service disruptions, including system outages and security alerts. Event-Driven Ansible works with Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Insights, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and ServiceNow.
“Event-Driven Ansible is the team member that never goes home,” Tom Anderson, Red Hat VP and general manager, Ansible, said in a statement. The service enables IT teams to work more efficiently and faster. IBM’s internal IT organization, with about 12,000 people, found a 60% productivity improvement by creating automation with Ansible Lightspeed, Anderson said.
The service is designed to enable more consistent response and reduce the burden of manual, error-prone and high-volume routine tasks such as resetting passwords, adjusting compute and storage, backups and more. It works in any environment, including traditional hardware and network infrastructure, cloud and edge.
Examples of tasks that Event-Driven Ansible can perform include restarting containerized applications, password resets for users that lock themselves out, device BIOS updates (which often require manual restarts) and troubleshooting wireless network problems.
“It benefits the infrastructure and operations teams by limiting those 2 a.m. calls to restart the service,” Jensen said. “But the real business benefit is to customer experience and resiliency.” The service can get networks and servers back up and running before the customer opens a trouble ticket. “Customer experience doesn’t suffer.”
Ansible also ensures consistency and standardizing procedures based on corporate policies, Red Hat said.
Because the service performs repetitive, reactive, labor-intensive work seen as undesirable by staff, Event-Driven Ansible can help organizations fill the skills gap, Anderson said in a Q&A with journalists last week.
Also, organizations deploying Event-Driven Ansible will be better prepared for upcoming European regulations requiring operational resilience, particularly in the financial industry, Richard Henshall, Red Hat Ansible head of product management, said.
The service will enable organizations to use generative AI without compromising security and confidentiality, Henshall said. Many enterprises won’t use existing, publicly available generative AI tools because the source of the recommendations is unknown and using those tools to resolve infrastructure problems requires disclosing confidential information. Because IBM and Red Hat develop Event-Driven Ansible, those problems aren’t issues. The recommendations come from IBM and Red Hat, and the vendors will keep confidential information private.
Event-driven Ansible competes with BMC, Broadcom, VMware, and Morpheus, Jensen said.
The service is scheduled for availability next month.