A New Dawn of Innovation – Red Hat Summit 2025

Posted: May 14th, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , | No Comments »

As the temperatures begin to rise, plants start to blossom, and for those in the Northern Hemisphere that have to bear the brunt of mother nature’s icy grip, hibernation season finally comes to a close. Spring also means that it is time for the enterprise Open Source community to come together at Red Hat Summit 2025 in Boston from May 19-22 to share how Open Source solutions have fostered innovation, new advancements, and where IT organizations and the community see the industry moving forward in the future.

Red Hat Summit once again represents a date that I circle every year as it provides me the opportunity to not only share all of the initiatives that I am involved with within the Open Source community, but how they have intersected with our customers’ business drivers and goals. Any of these benefits will ultimately impact any consumer of the products or solutions offered by these organizations. Whether you are taking a trip or just browsing the internet on a lazy Saturday, one way or another, you are using Red Hat and Open Source software.

As is typically the case, my schedule for the conference is packed to the brim. But, it affords me the opportunity to provide a glimpse into the efforts that I am engaged in with our customers, but most importantly, connect with everyone in attendance. While the IT and cloud native landscape is quite broad, there are several specific domains that I am focused on these days: Security and automation. These pillars will be evident in the activities that I have planned and the following are just a taste of the sessions and events that I will be participating in at the conference.

GitOps for your Operating System

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could apply all of the same patterns that you have developed for cloud native environments, like Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automated build and deployment processes, and the integration of security tooling and methodologies, to your entire IT estate? Well good news, now you can. With Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you now can! By leveraging the same technologies as traditional container images, you can now manage your traditional Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments and achieve many of the same benefits that you have become accustomed to within your cloud native environments.

Join Valentin Rothberg and I in the Red Hat Summit DevZone where we will showcase how to use GitOps methodologies and tools to build, manage, and deploy image mode for RHEL at scale. Not only will you see these technologies firsthand, but you will learn how to leverage them within your own environment.

Session Details:

Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and GitOps: A marriage made in heaven
Monday, May 19, 2025
3:00 PM – 3:20 PM EDT
DevZone – Expo hall

Ansible enables OpenShift Virtualization at Scale

Continuing with the theme of bridging the gap between Cloud Native and traditional operating environments, OpenShift Virtualization has been one of the most impactful technologies that enterprise organizations have begun to adopt at scale. Built on the upstream KubeVirt project, Virtual Machines and containers can now coexist within the same environment, simplifying how organizations manage their entire estate. The adoption of this solution involves everything from the baseline deployment and configuration of OpenShift Virtualization itself, to the creation of Virtual Machine instances. While OpenShift Virtualization affords organizations the opportunity to deploy net new Virtual Machine instances, the ability to migrate Virtual Machines from existing Hypervisors, such as VMware, is an area of interest and one of the primary factors for adopting the technology. Regardless of how OpenShift Virtualization will be used, one thing is for certain, automation plays a pivotal role. 
Join Ansible Product Manager Andrius Benokraitis and I as we illustrate how Ansible and Ansible Automation Platform is not just a nice to have, but an essential component of a journey toward adopting OpenShift Virtualization at scale.

Session Details:

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization at scale with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
10:30 AM – 11:10 AM EDT
BCEC – Room 252 B

Zero trust multicluster authentication in OpenShift at Ford

If you are running OpenShift, then there’s a good chance that you are running more than one cluster. And, when running multiple OpenShift clusters, there’s most likely going to be a need to communicate between them. The ability to do so in a secure fashion that aligns to Zero Trust principles, such as leveraging short lived credentials, has been a longstanding challenge. While many implementations have and continue to make use of long lived Service Account tokens, it does raise a number of security concerns. What happens if the credential is compromised? What is the revocation and rotation process? These questions and more require answers. Even the Kubernetes project has acknowledged this challenge and deprecated (as of version 1.24) the creation and association of long lived tokens to service accounts. To fill this void, a solution was needed.

In this session, I will be joined by Arthur Vardevanyan, Kubernetes Platform Lead on the Container as a Service (CaaS) team at Ford Motor Company, and we will share an approach that addresses these challenges firsthand. By working in close collaboration, a solution was developed to enable multicluster authentication between OpenShift clusters, with all of the benefits inherent with Zero Trust principles. Not only will attendees learn about this solution in detail including how it can be enabled within their own OpenShift environments, but some of the potential options available in the future.

Session Details:

Zero trust multicluster authentication: API machine-to-machine identity federation
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
11:40 AM – 12:00 PM EDT
Discovery Theater 3 – Expo hall

Enabling OpenShift External Authentication with Adobe

When OpenShift 3 was released in 2015, one of the revolutionary features that it included was an out of the box authentication and authorization system – a key differentiator from other Kubernetes based distributions. Fast forward 10 years and most of the original architecture that had been implemented remains. However, the upstream Kubernetes project and the industry as a whole have made large advancements in how they manage access to clusters. The ability to directly access the Kubernetes API using popular protocols, like OpenID Connect (OIDC) provided by external Identity Providers, like the Red Hat build of Keycloak, are patterns that have seen largescale adoption. As a result, a collaborative effort involving one of Red Hat’s key customers, Adobe, resulted in a new offering being rolled out across OpenShift platforms.

In this session, Alexandru-Cristian Dobre, Cloud DevOPS Engineer at Adobe, Anjali Telang, Red Hat Cloud Identity and Security Lead and I will introduce a new capability of OpenShift called External Authentication. We will share how, through the co-engineering efforts with Adobe, this new feature was released initially targeting Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) with Hosted Control Planes in order to satisfy Adobe’s critical business needs. Aside from describing the technical functionality of External Authentication, we will also illustrate the collaboration between Adobe and Red Hat and how by working together, we were able to not only provide a solution to meet key business critical requirements, but enable a solution that can be leveraged by other organizations. In addition, the session will also discuss the rollout of this feature to additional OpenShift environments, including other managed cloud offerings, such as Azure Red Hat OpenShift and self managed deployments.

Session Details

Ushering in a more secure and standardized authentication solution in Red Hat OpenShift for Adobe Ethos
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
11:15 AM – 11:55 AM EDT
BCEC – Room 255

Connect with the Red Hat Services Team

Red Hat Services which encompasses Training and Certification, Technical Account Management (TAM) and of course, Consulting are your one stop shop for properly taking advantage of your Open Source investment. In addition to the speaking sessions that have been highlighted previously, I will also be available at the Red Hat Services booth within the Expo Hall where I and my fellow Red Hat Services team will be able to not only answer any of the questions that you may have related to our offerings, but to share some of the latest offerings available and how you can take advantage of them. The Red Hat Services booth is always brimming with excitement as each of the Services teams engage with attendees in unique ways. It is always a highlight of any Red Hat Summit event.

We are at a pivotal moment that will define the next phase of technological advancement, adoption and innovation. By working together, leveraging Open Source solutions and methodologies, we can transform how technology affects our work and our everyday lives. Red Hat Summit provides the vehicle to connect with Open Source community and industry leaders. If you have yet to register, I urge you to do so as it is an event that you do not want to miss out on. For those that are attending, please do reach out on any of my social media handles so that we can connect and collaborate. Hope to see you there!