Red Hat Summit: Connect 2026 Washington, DC

Deploying production applications to different environments on reusable, security-focused  foundations with a clear and simple way to build and manage them is a major challenge for IT. In this lab, we'll explore how using image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to build images can deliver working applications on a more secure and manageable foundation. Creating a production system often requires collaboration and requirements from different teams. We'll build our sample application with a phased approach, detailing the fundamentals of image mode operations in a context you can take with you to your environment. This opinionated method will tackle the needs of the operators, the security team, and the developers in ways that are easy to understand and remix. Along the way, we'll highlight different benefits and approaches that image mode uniquely delivers. Today, you'll create a working application host by:Defining the standard baseline environment.Configuring the security posture and compliance.Delivering a common hardened platform for application deployments.Using a single source image for multiple environments.

Modernizing infrastructure means bringing virtual machines and containers together on a single, unified platform to simplify operations, increase agility, and accelerate innovation. In this hands-on lab, you'll learn how Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization enables faster, more flexible modernization through real-world exercises focused on integration, automation, and developer self-service.Attendees will learn how to:Make use of Red Hat OpenShift intelligent assistant for AI-powered virtual machine (VM) insights and troubleshooting.Integrate VMs into Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh for improved resilience, observability, and traffic control.Automate VM lifecycle management using GitOps and Argo CD for consistent, declarative infrastructure operations.Empower developers with self-service VM provisioning through Red Hat Developer Hub to accelerate application delivery.Extend infrastructure capabilities across the hybrid cloud for cost optimization, scalability, and reliability.Join us to see how OpenShift Virtualization delivers a unified, hybrid-ready platform that simplifies operations and drives innovation across modern IT environments.

From "Software is Eating the World" to the "Mythos Moment," organizations' dependency on software has expanded exponentially. With new AI-powered tools, hackers have more ability than ever to build and exploit vulnerabilities. In this session, you'll learn about Project Lightwell, and how Red Hat is helping companies better manage the Vulnerability Gap.

Your observability and AI tools are generating insights faster than your team can act on them. Every manual handoff between detection and remediation introduces delay, inconsistency, and the kind of ungoverned change that keeps operations leaders up at night. The missing piece isn't better insights. It's a trusted, governed execution layer that can close the loop. This session explores how Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform bridges the insight-to-action gap, enabling IT teams to move from reactive firefighting to intelligent, automated remediation without sacrificing the audit trails, change control, and compliance requirements that enterprise operations require. We will cover: A practical framework for architecting the execution layer your AIOps strategy needs; Real-world use cases including automated ticket enrichment, self-healing workflows, and intelligent capacity orchestration; Proven results from enterprise organizations that have operationalized observability data with Ansible Automation Platform; Guidance on integrating AI assistance within enterprise guardrails; How to position your automation practice today to take advantage of agentic AI without introducing unacceptable risk. If you're dealing with alert fatigue, looking to operationalize observability data, or preparing your automation practice for the future of IT operations, this session gives you the blueprint to move from insights to outcomes with confidence.

Federal agencies often spend weeks or months standing up new environments, onboarding application teams, and integrating platform services across OpenShift, Automation Platform, identity providers, observability tools, and supporting infrastructure. This session demonstrates how the Automation Development Office (ADO) Collections framework enables a Fast Start approach to platform onboarding by transforming complex deployment and configuration activities into repeatable, automated workflows. Attendees will see how ADO Collections generate standardized deployment artifacts, bootstrap Automation Platform configurations, create reusable workflows, and automate the deployment of common federal platform services including OpenShift, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Identity Management, Keycloak, Grafana, GitLab, Kafka, and other shared services. The session will showcase a component-driven onboarding model that allows platform teams to rapidly generate environment configurations, deployment playbooks, job templates, and workflow automation while maintaining consistency, governance, and operational standards across environments.

The introduction of agentic AI—the next evolution of application development—to public health systems is transforming how insight, automation, and coordination occur across health networks. Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers provide a standard, security-focused foundation for this change, helping AI agents, data sources, and analytic tools optimally interoperate across jurisdictions. Featuring experts from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this panel will explore how MCP-ready agentic architectures are redefining public health infrastructure, from federated disease surveillance and outbreak response to privacy-preserving data integration and real-time analytics. Panelists will discuss governance, provenance, and explainability mechanisms that build trust in AI while reducing cost, improving resilience, and accelerating innovation across the global public health ecosystem.

This hands-on workshop equips participants with the skills to build a true defense-in-depth strategy for complex, heterogeneous environments—operating at machine speed across every layer, from the endpoint to the automation itself. Participants will move beyond reactive, manual processes by building cross-platform automation across three pillars: Defend (patching at velocity with zero-downtime workflows, while securing automation content through a trusted, verified pipelines), Contain (using event-driven automation as a "circuit breaker" to rapidly respond to incidents, isolating threats and revoking credentials in real time), and Comply (enforcing CIS/STIG baselines and policy-as-code guardrails for least-privilege compliance). Attendees will have hands-on experience deploying automated workflows that accelerate patching across the fleet, slash Mean Time to Respond when incidents occur, and ensure every change human or automated meets security and compliance standards before execution.

Agentic AI apps don’t fail silently; they fail distributedly. This hands-on lab shows how to make multi-agent AI systems observable end-to-end on Red Hat AI. By exploring a multi-agent app integrated with Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, we demonstrate an AgentOps discipline that delivers visibility from infrastructure to AI model backends. As organizations scale, teams face cascading errors, hidden latency, and complex integration bottlenecks. Attendees will leave with practical patterns for observing, troubleshooting, and evaluating agentic workflows. Attendees will also learn how to:Monitor the stack: Use Red Hat AI’s out-of-the-box observability stack to track key metrics and logs.Trace multi-agent executions: Track requests across multi-agent frameworks (like LangGraph/LangChain) and MCP tools to understand the complete decision-making path using Red Hat AI and MLFlow tracing features.Diagnose and fix distributed failures: Simulate real-world rollout issues, such as artificial delays in MCP servers or failing multi-agent communications, and use tracing to pinpoint the root cause and deploy the fix.Large language model (LLM) evaluations: Go beyond basic observability by combining tracing with LLM evaluations in MLflow, ensuring your agents maintain high-quality outputs alongside system reliability.

As organizations confront a step-change in cyber risk, the threat is no longer incremental. Frontier AI capabilities, including systems such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, point to a future where adversaries can discover vulnerabilities, develop exploits, and scale cyber operations faster than traditional security models can respond. At the same time, Q-Day and “harvest now, decrypt later” risks make post-quantum readiness a present mission concern, not a distant planning exercise. This session will examine how Agentic AI and post-quantum cryptography (PQC) are integrated into Red Hat technologies to reduce risk, strengthen resilience, and protect mission delivery. The session will include a live demo and a discussion focused on: - Proactive resilience: Moving from reactive patching to AI-assisted detection, prioritization, remediation, and self-healing infrastructure. - Post-quantum readiness: Practical steps for cryptographic discovery, crypto-agility, and legacy modernization. - Mission-safe AI adoption: Preserving control, auditability, determinism, and compliance while adopting agentic capabilities.

Many enterprises are anchored to legacy virtualization, facing vendor lock-in and modernization challenges. How do you seamlessly migrate thousands of virtual machines (VMs) and manage them alongside containers? How do you accelerate your application modernization strategy with so many VM-based workloads? Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization provides the answers. With OpenShift Virtualization as your strategic platform, you can run VMs on dedicated clusters, begin modernizing VM-based applications with cloud-native tools and processes, and eventually simultaneously convert them to cloud-native containers in the same environment. Join us and discover the capabilities OpenShift Virtualization provides to help you migrate and modernize VMs and applications at scale—whether in the cloud, in your datacenter, or at the edge of your network. In this interactive session, you will: Get a comprehensive look at the current features of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Gain insight into key strategic themes and the 2026 roadmap. Learn from live demos showcasing day 2 virtualization operations.Get an opportunity to ask questions and offer feedback about how Red Hat can better adapt to meet your evolving needs.This session is ideal for IT administrators, solution architects, and technical decision makers planning their datacenter modernization and cloud-native journey. 

In today's fast-moving era of AI-driven cyber threats, modern organizations must drastically accelerate vulnerability remediation to protect critical digital infrastructure. Join Joon Paik at Red Hat Summit Connect to discover how to supercharge your patch management strategy using the Ansible Automation Platform. This session demonstrates a scalable, patching pipeline that seamlessly leverages Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Lightspeed's intelligent capabilities alongside Red Hat Satellite's robust environment management. Learn to orchestrate automated scanning, execute rapid cross-platform patch deployments and configuration management, and maintain strict compliance while preserving application stability using event-driven automation. Turn reactive maintenance into proactive enterprise defense.

For highly regulated sectors—such as financial services, healthcare, defense, and the public sector—technological innovation is fundamentally bound by strict risk parameters. Navigating the modern threat landscape requires balancing stringent compliance directives (like DORA, NIS2, and the EU AI Act) against an explosion of AI-driven vulnerabilities, fragile software supply chains, and public cloud vendor lock-in. This session explores how Red Hat’s comprehensive portfolio addresses these challenges by transforming risk mitigation from a manual security checklist into an automated, architectural reality. We will analyze the core announcements from Red Hat Summit, focusing on the newly introduced Digital Autonomy Framework and its four foundational pillars: Data, Technical, Operational, and Assurance sovereignty. Crucially, the session will break down the groundbreaking Project Lightwell—a massive $5 billion joint initiative between IBM and Red Hat that combines advanced AI with over 20,000 engineers to form an industry-first security clearinghouse for open-source software. Attendees will discover how Red Hat enables enterprises to lower their active risk profile, eliminate configuration drift, and establish airtight guardrails from the upstream open-source supply chain to global cloud environments without sacrificing operational velocity.