Red Hat Announces General Availability of Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed to Supercharge Hybrid Cloud Productivity with Generative AI

Integrated generative AI assistant accelerates user proficiency and boosts operational efficiency across all Red Hat OpenShift environments

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed, a generative AI (gen AI)-based virtual assistant integrated into Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed is set to significantly enhance how users interact with and manage their application platform deployments across the hybrid cloud. It enables users to be more accurate even without extensive expertise while freeing up more experienced IT workers to drive greater innovation.

Faster application delivery is essential to organizations across industries as they look to improve customer experiences. Many organizations, however, struggle to keep pace with the increasing complexity of IT and a widening skills gap present considerable hurdles. According to IDC, by 2026, more than 90% of organizations worldwide will feel the pain of the IT skills crisis, amounting to some $5.5 trillion in losses caused by product delays, impaired competitiveness, and loss of business.¹

Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed directly addresses this skills gap by providing OpenShift-specific gen AI capabilities in the console itself. Users new to Red Hat OpenShift can more readily acquire the new skills needed to oversee their application platform estates, while experienced users can more rapidly scale their expertise to support production operations.

Improved productivity with a tailored experience

Acknowledging the inherent complexity of modern IT, Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed provides an intelligent guide, offering proactive, step-by-step, tailored assistance directly within the Red Hat OpenShift web console. This enables enterprise IT teams, regardless of their experience level, to navigate complex application landscapes with increased confidence and efficiency.

Using natural language, users can ask Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed questions about Red Hat OpenShift. By using and applying Red Hat’s extensive knowledge and experience in building, deploying and managing applications across the hybrid cloud, Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed can assist with tasks like troubleshooting and investigating cluster resources. Users can easily share information from their environment to the chat window, allowing OpenShift Lightspeed to answer questions using real context.

Red Hat OpenShift lightspeed offers flexible integration with a variety of model providers, including prominent services like OpenAI, Azure OpenAI and WatsonX. Additionally, users can leverage private AI options hosted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI for enhanced control and customization. This diverse compatibility ensures organizations can choose the AI models that best suit their specific needs and security requirements.

Additionally, with cluster-interaction, available as a technology preview, Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed can directly retrieve context from an organization’s clusters for faster and more accurate answers. Instead of more generalized guidance, Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed will be able to answer more detailed questions about a specific environment.

To enable organizations to customize Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed to their unique development processes, bring your own knowledge (BYO Knowledge), is also now available as a technology preview feature. BYO Knowledge allows organizations to introduce their own unique organizational knowledge and process documentation into the Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed system, underscoring Red Hat’s commitment to adaptable solutions by tailoring the generated responses to the specific organization and their way of using Red Hat OpenShift.

Modern virtualization, simplified

Hybrid cloud environments increasingly consist of both modern containerized applications and established virtualized workloads. Red Hat OpenShift provides a crucial unified platform for managing these diverse environments. Extending this unified approach, Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed delivers intelligent assistance specifically tailored for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. This capability not only simplifies the often complex process of migrating from legacy virtualization vendors but also significantly eases modernization efforts by providing readily accessible answers to virtualization-specific questions. Organizations can now more confidently integrate and manage VMs alongside containerized applications, leveraging Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed's guidance on everything from VM migrations to networking and storage, ultimately accelerating their journey towards a more agile, future-ready infrastructure.

Availability

Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed is expected to be available June 2025.

Red Hat Summit

Join the Red Hat Summit keynotes to hear the latest from Red Hat executives, customers and partners:

• Modernized infrastructure meets enterprise-ready AI — Tuesday, May 20, 8-10 a.m. EDT (YouTube)
• Hybrid cloud evolves to deliver enterprise innovation — Wednesday, May 21, 8-9:30 a.m. EDT (YouTube)

Supporting Quotes

Mike Barrett, vice president, Hybrid Platforms, Red Hat

“Delivering AI-enabled applications is a top priority for organizations around the globe, but many IT teams already struggle with the complexities associated with hybrid cloud computing, let alone bringing these intelligent applications to life. 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. With Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed, organizations can improve their productivity, freeing up time and putting a greater focus on delivering innovation to their customers.”

Thomas Munoz, core SRE manager, Shopping, Amadeus

“As a leading provider of advanced technology solutions within the global travel industry, our company prioritizes using innovative technologies to better serve our customers. Red Hat OpenShift has already helped us streamline operations and reduce time to market for new services. We look forward to exploring Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed as we see strong potential for the technology to help us further accelerate and simplify the way our teams operate.”

Additional Resources

• Watch a demo of Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed
• Read more about how Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed can help with virtualization
• Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed
• Learn more about Red Hat Summit
• See all of Red Hat’s announcements this week in the Red Hat Summit newsroom
• Follow @RedHatSummit or #RHSummit on X for event-specific updates

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About Red Hat

Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world's leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow's IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are based on the company’s current assumptions regarding future business and financial performance. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statement in this press release speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

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