Safeguarding and scaling application delivery in the era of AI

Under the industry-wide pressure to deliver software faster, organizations have shifted left—moving critical responsibilities earlier in the development process in an effort to eliminate unnecessary hand-offs. This reaction has accelerated delivery, but at a cost. Developers are now asked to manage every aspect of the software delivery pipeline while still writing the code that propels the business forward. AI tools meant to help developers ease this pressure have overwhelmed codebases with auto-generated code, adding to their work the need to address vulnerabilities and apply remediations at scale. Despite their best efforts, developers continue to struggle to balance rapid time to market with the need for rigorous security practices and consistency.

Addressing friction in the workflow, adopting more strategic uses of AI, and embracing a structured platform engineering approach can help organizations overcome these challenges. Beyond safeguarding a pipeline, Red Hat® Services partners with teams to guide the cultural and operational changes across people, process, and technology. Through hands-on consulting assessments, role-based training, and proactive technical account management, Red Hat equips organizations with the skills and long-term support needed for developers to achieve lasting self-sufficiency. 

How developer overload compromises proactive security

As organizations ask developers to manage the delivery pipeline while also ensuring security and compliance in the era of AI, developers are at increased risk of burnout. In fact, “95% of engineering leaders and 98% of developers believe AI tools could greatly reduce burnout, while 67% of developers said they spend more time debugging AI-generated code, and 68% spend more time resolving AI-related security vulnerabilities.”² Yet, they are still being tasked with additional responsibilities like software delivery and the expectation to become experts across multiple domains. This requirement means learning new skills such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and continuous deployment, monitoring, observability, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for containers. When developers are overwhelmed by managing complex environment setups and manual compliance checks, it not only hinders productivity it also exposes the organization to increased risk. This issue makes it harder for teams to be proactive about security, and increases the likelihood of unvetted dependencies or vulnerabilities slipping into production.

IT operations teams build resilient platforms to solve these issues, but internal adoption often stalls. This is because these portals are usually built from an operation team’s perspective rather than a developer team’s, resulting in complex interfaces that may not meet the team's immediate needs. Combined with the fact that developers are already frequently confronted with manual workflows, expanding tool sprawl, and limited guidance—and the result is a fragmented user experience. All of this leads to increased friction in the developer workflow, higher operational overhead, and unnecessary toil in daily development activities.

Addressing these challenges is crucial, because they directly translate into lost business value. When platforms lack an intuitive self-service experience, the resulting friction and toil become massive hidden costs to the organization.

• Friction acts as a severe tax on time-to-market. When developers are forced to stop and wait for manual approvals or team hand-offs, what should be a rapid deployment becomes a stalled initiative. This adds frustration to the developer experience and causes delayed revenue as teams are unable to match the response times of competitive threats.
• Toil represents a misallocation of specialized talent. When developers have to spend their day responding to an unplanned outage or filling out a support ticket for a resource, they are unable to write the code that the business relies on. This unnecessary operational overhead drains engineering budgets, stifles innovation, and fuels developer burnout.

Navigating the AI risk landscape

Beyond the operational shift left, the rapid emergence of AI has introduced an additional layer of cognitive load for development teams. As developers explore AI-assisted coding tools, organizations face the growing risk of "shadow AI"—the use of unvetted public models and services that introduce security, compliance, and legal vulnerabilities. Because AI coding assistants can quickly recommend unsafe or non-existent dependency versions, developers are constantly at risk of unknowingly importing untrusted libraries. A survey conducted by Stack Overflow found that, the biggest single frustration, cited by 66% of developers, is dealing with "AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite," which often leads to the second-biggest frustration: "Debugging AI-generated code is more time-consuming" (45%).³ Developers must also navigate changing digital sovereignty regulations, adding complex governance hurdles to the daily workflow. 

The widespread use of frontier AI models is accelerating the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Because AI generates code at a massive scale, IT leaders are forced to push updates at an increased frequency. The need to deploy remediations that keep pace with the AI discovery of them has overwhelmed legacy change management and manual review processes. Open source communities are pushed to a breaking point, with major project maintainers reporting a massive influx of low-quality AI pull requests that exhaust review time. As a result, organizations are forced to shorten lead times, ensuring they can push changes fast enough to patch vulnerabilities. With the time to exploit (TTE) for critical vulnerabilities shrinking to less than 1 day, organizations need more than manual processes to succeed.⁴ 

To more safely use AI-powered development without overwhelming developers, organizations can’t rely on fragmented tools; they must adopt a structured platform approach that provides trusted, security-focused pathways for innovation. By transforming the SDLC into a fully governed agentic software factory, organizations can deploy autonomous agents that remediate threats while reducing review times. By providing access to curated Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA)-verified trusted libraries, teams can eliminate unvetted code at the source. 

Teams can’t successfully deploy autonomous agents or achieve quick remediation on top of fragmented, manual workflows. To eliminate workflow friction for developers without sacrificing enterprise security, organizations must evolve their operations. This requires unifying the developer experience on the front end, while standardizing infrastructure and security on the back end. Instead of asking developers to manage complex vulnerability checklists, organizations must embed security defaults directly into the foundational platform. Additionally, standardizing this infrastructure is a prerequisite for surviving the AI-accelerated SDLC. This approach protects the software supply chain and reduces enterprise risk.

To achieve this, organizations can use a comprehensive internal developer platform. This underlying ecosystem encompasses the core application platform (like Red Hat OpenShift®), inner-loop and outer-loop DevOps tools, powerful automation capabilities (such as Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform), and software supply chain security features (like Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer and Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer).

Built on top of this platform is the internal developer portal, which serves as the self-service front end. Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite provides additional security features for the software supply chain—it governs by integrating Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer and Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer into the pipeline for automated compliance, exploit verification, and artifact signing. It also provides organizations access to Red Hat Developer Hub as their enterprise-grade portal. Acting as a central control plane, Red Hat Developer Hub consolidates all tools, documentation, and application programming interfaces (APIs) into a single, self-service user interface. This consolidation allows developers to instantly provision preapproved golden-path project templates that come fully configured with the tools, base images, verified libraries, and sanctioned AI assistants to prevent shadow AI. By integrating Red Hat Developer Hub intelligent assistant directly into the portal, developers can automate daily tasks and get instant technical guidance while ensuring the organization only uses enterprise-authorized large language models (LLMs). This eliminates provisioning delays, minimizes idle time, and drastically reduces the need for IT support tickets.

Standardize and combine inner-loop and outer-loop developer tools

By using an internal developer platform like Red Hat Developer Hub, organizations can curate, manage, and replicate development environments to simplify the experience of building applications across inner and outer loops:

• Inner-loop tools help developers create, edit, test, and debug source code before checking it into Git. By standardizing these workflows, organizations ensure developer environments mirror the production cluster, removing the costly "it works on my machine but does it work elsewhere" guesswork. Using standardized tools for local container building (such as Red Hat Desktop) and cloud-based integrated development environments with zero configuration (such as Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces) drastically accelerates developer onboarding. They minimize environment setup time and provide a regulated, contained area for AI experimentation before code ever reaches the repository. 
• Outer-loop tools focus on simplifying application deployments via CI/CD systems and GitOps practices. To govern and maintain security on the path to production, platform engineers can create golden-path project templates (via Red Hat Developer Hub) that automatically provision pipelines and configurations. By standardizing CI/CD workflows using a Kubernetes-native framework based on Tekton (such as Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines and GitOps) and integrating automated compliance and exploit verification (via Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite), organizations establish a declarative, single source of truth. This ensures scalable, consistent container image creation while maintaining strict software supply chain security.

While optimizing for developer speed is essential, developers are also dealing with an evolving threat landscape. AI can now scan codebases at machine speed, drastically shrinking the time between a vulnerability's exposure and a potential exploit. Relying on disconnected security gates at the end of the release lifecycle stalls deployments and delays critical features.

Security shouldn't be an afterthought or a series of manual speedbumps. Developers need a standard framework, like a trusted software factory, built upon an enterprise application platform like Red Hat OpenShift. Using this foundation, the Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite delivers a pre-engineered foundation of core automation capabilities—including cryptographic signing, software bill of materials (SBOM) management, and reachability analysis—needed to put this framework into practice without forcing teams to build it from scratch. This factory architecture is based on Konflux, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project. Red Hat uses this same framework to protect its own commercial builds, having produced more than 2 million artifacts with it in 2025 alone.⁸

The trusted software factory provides the automated engine for the entire software supply chain, delivering a single system where both traditional software and AI artifacts are built, signed, tracked, and governed from initial dependency intake all the way through to production cluster deployment. By automating compliance checking, cryptographic artifact signing, and exploit reachability verification with integrated tools like Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer and Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer, organizations can help ensure that every artifact moving through the pipelines is verified by default. This builds security directly into the pipeline, keeping enterprises protected without delaying developers.

Building this architecture is a major milestone for organizations securing and accelerating their application deployments, but operationalizing it across the entire application portfolio requires a coordinated plan. Red Hat Consulting works side-by-side with teams to bridge this gap, offering the Red Hat Consulting: Trusted Software Supply Chain Assessment with expert-led workshops to evaluate software delivery lifecycle maturity, identify critical supply chain gaps, and build a prescriptive roadmap.

Adopting platform engineering and building a trusted software factory is a transformative journey, requiring changes in both culture and technology. Deploying new architectural frameworks often introduces growing pains, as organizations struggle to implement standardized security tools and processes without disrupting existing developer workflows. To navigate this, organizations need a clear understanding of their automation tooling that then aligns with their platform's maturity. While platforms like Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite provide the automated engine, Red Hat Consulting provides expert guidance and a strategic roadmap tailored to the specific environment, ensuring an aligned transition from fragmented workflows to a fully operational trusted software factory.

Phase 1: Strategize and build the foundation

In order for the platform to meet the needs of an organization at its current maturity level, Red Hat Consulting breaks the required implementation down into a manageable, strategic approach. 

To begin building their application platform, Red Hat recommends teams complete the Red Hat Consulting: Developer Experience Assessment to evaluate their current process, identify developer workflow friction, and build a strategic roadmap to clear the path for faster, safer deployments. Through collaborative discovery workshops, organizations use core lean methodologies such as:

• Value stream mapping (VSM): A technique to visualize and analyze the steps in the production process, identifying opportunities to reduce waste.
• Metrics-based process mapping (MBPM): A methodology that combines process mapping with metrics (lead time, cycle time, and deployment frequency) to quantify the cost of friction.

Alternatively, organizations focused on securing their software supply chain may choose to participate in the Red Hat Consulting: Trusted Software Supply Chain Assessment. While similar to the Developer Experience Assessment, this assessment leans into specific areas of the supply chain and puts an emphasis on security, laying the critical groundwork for future exploration of more advanced platform evolutions as customers consider Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and the use of AI agents in their software development lifecycle. 

Once the friction points are identified, organizations move onto the Red Hat Consulting: Application Platform Foundations¹⁰, which helps organizations execute the plan they developed in the assessment phase and lay the foundation for the organization’s software factory. This replaces fragmented, do-it-yourself (DIY) tooling by onboarding developers to a unified application platform powered by Red Hat OpenShift.

Together, Red Hat Consulting works with organizations to shift from strategy to execution by implementing core capabilities such as Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines, GitOps, and Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, building a foundation upon which a trusted software factory can be built. 

Phase 2: Expand and evolve

As the platform matures, Red Hat Consulting helps organizations scale through an advanced software suite that integrates a trusted software supply chain. 

• Red Hat Consulting: Trusted Software Delivery helps customers move from the initial software factory to the trusted software factory. Red Hat Consulting evaluates the environment, eliminates technical gaps, and identifies untapped platform capabilities to help get the most out of an organization’s existing tools. Red Hat experts work alongside teams to use Red Hat Developer Hub software templates for organizational governance. Additionally, Red Hat experts integrate automated compliance checks with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security. This collaboration uses the cryptographic signing, Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) management, and automated pipeline checks from the Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite to build a security-focused, zero-trust software supply chain that scales.
• Red Hat Consulting: Enterprise-Led Modernization is designed specifically for organizations focused on modernizing their application portfolio. This customizable experience depends on a well–established software factory foundation and introduces Red Hat Developer Hub, migration toolkit for applications, and Red Hat Developer Lightspeed for migration toolkit for applications to create a self-service portal capable of expediting portfolio modernization with the assistance of AI. This framework empowers developers to independently lead modernization efforts and eliminate technical debt by systematically migrating legacy workloads to Red Hat OpenShift. By using AI to automate code analysis, containerization, and troubleshooting, organizations can dramatically accelerate refactoring. This engagement scales modernization across the enterprise by implementing repeatable, standardized patterns for cloud-native transitions, supporting application platform success through measurable processes that are built for scale and long-term reliability.
• Red Hat Consulting: Intelligent Application Modernization is designed for organizations that are ready to modernize existing applications with AI. Developer teams collaborate with Red Hat Consulting to integrate AI models and capabilities directly into current applications within their trusted software factory powered by Red Hat OpenShift. This collaborative model allows organizations to rapidly scale intelligent application development and get more out of their AI investments. 

Customer success story: Platform engineering in practice 

KDDI Corp sought to optimize its communication platforms to deliver reliable services to its users. To respond in an agile way to the evolving needs of their customers, KDDI Corp modernized its application development strategy. Working closely with Red Hat experts, KDDI Corp deployed Red Hat OpenShift to replace fragmented, DIY tooling with a security-focused, supported software factory.

“Until recently, deployment used to take around three hours, so this 98.89% reduction is dramatic," said Ippei Kato, Core Staff , Communication Platform Department of the Advanced Platform Development Division, KDDI. “The shorter deployment time not only improves the customer experience but also helps prevent human error and potential failures.”¹¹ 

Ultimately, KDDI’s success was bolstered by their partnership with Red Hat's experts and support. Red Hat helped KDDI eliminate technical risk, optimize daily operations, and build a more reliable platform designed for long-term growth.

Read the full KDDI case study

Red Hat Services works with teams to manage the moving parts of modern application development, adopt agile practices, and benefit from the power of open source innovation. Beyond the targeted Red Hat Consulting opportunities outlined above, organizations can also benefit from support ranging from planning and deployment to training and guidance, including:

• Red Hat Training and Certification: While consulting engagements like those detailed above build an organization’s infrastructure, lasting success requires a team that has the skills to continue innovating. Red Hat offers hands-on curriculum for both developers and IT ops teams to bridge the divide between platform engineering and application delivery. Red Hat offers a fully customizable Container Adoption Boot Camp for Developers (DO720), which includes a 1-year subscription to the Red Hat Learning Subscription Standard, including (up to) five exam opportunities. For teams looking for introductory courses, a couple relevant options include: 
  • Red Hat OpenShift Administration I: Operating a Production Cluster (DO188)
  • Red Hat OpenShift Developer II: Building and Deploying Cloud-native Applications (DO288)
  • See the full list¹³ of developer-focused curriculum
• Proactive planning with Red Hat Technical Account Management: After building a trusted software factory, organizations need to make sure it remains a stable environment for continuous innovation. By collaborating with Red Hat Technical Account Managers (TAMs), organizations gain strategic collaborators who proactively resolve problems before they occur, allowing developers to stay focused on delivering value. A couple of relevant TAM offerings include: 
  • Security TAMs provide expert guidance on security hardening, compliance, and risk mitigation. With a Security TAM on their side, teams don’t have to face compliance audits or risk mitigation alone. 
  • Red Hat OpenShift TAMs provide strategic guidance on application platform design to assist teams in improving DevOps delivery, resolving platform issues, and making sure hybrid infrastructure scales efficiently. 

Whether your organization needs to deploy an internal developer platform like Red Hat Developer Hub or build automated security compliance into your environment, Red Hat Services is here to help.

• Speak to a Red Hatter to learn more about how Red Hat Services can help with protecting and accelerating application delivery in the era of AI.
• Book a no-cost discovery session to identify your goals and determine recommended next steps as part of a project approach that addresses your organization’s specific challenges and needs.