Red Hat Summit: Connect 2026 Austin, Texas

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.

Virtualizing workloads on a modern, container-native platform unlocks new levels of operational efficiency, resilience, and flexibility for teams managing traditional infrastructure. In this hands-on lab, you’ll work through the core capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, from day-one VM operations to advanced migration, storage, networking, and application integration. Attendees will learn how to: - Manage virtual machine lifecycle — create, configure, and right-size VMs directly on OpenShift. - Migrate existing VMware vSphere workloads to OpenShift Virtualization using the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV), with minimal disruption. - Navigate storage changes and manage persistent storage for VMs within the OpenShift ecosystem. - Protect workloads with backup and recovery workflows using OpenShift API for Data Protection (OADP). - Standardize VM deployments with reusable Templates and InstanceTypes to accelerate provisioning and enforce consistency. - Configure advanced networking, including L2 network mappings and User Defined Networks (UDN), to meet enterprise connectivity requirements. - Expose VM-hosted applications through services and routes, bridging the gap between virtualized workloads and modern application delivery. Join us to experience how OpenShift Virtualization delivers a unified, production-ready platform that simplifies VM operations and accelerates the path from legacy infrastructure to a cloud-native future.

Your open source vendors have figured out they gave away too much. So they changed the license. Then the pricing model. Then the terms around what "free" actually means. They're not done. This session is about what that costs you, and what you can do about it. We'll discuss open source MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Redis that run on your infrastructure, with engineering support from the people who maintain the code.

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.

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.

This session shares how an a customer is using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) image mode to raise their security baseline and simplify Day 2 operations across a large, regulated estate. We will examine the bank’s approach to golden images, promotion and signing, controlled rollouts, and drift detection—as well as how Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Lightspeed fit into the flow. Attendees will learn how this customer reduced change risk, accelerated patch cadence, and made audits more predictable. By the end of this session, you will know what pitfalls to avoid and have access to a starter playbook for your own image-based rollout.

Organizations are increasingly turning to AI for transformative business insights and task automation. This session offers a practical introduction to Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) with Red Hat AI, showing you how to deploy and manage generative AI models at scale to meet specific enterprise needs. These models can be served for business insights as well as linked to other AI agents to perceive the world around them and complete tasks. We'll cover deploying models on your own infrastructure, ensuring scalability and data sovereignty. You'll get a clear overview of integrated services, access controls, and how to view usage metrics for chargeback. We'll also explore practical, high-impact use cases like AI-powered code assistants for developers and agentic AI applications, demonstrating the immediate business value MaaS can deliver.

Security threats move in seconds, but manual incident response can take hours. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to transform slow, reactive security tasks into automated, production-safe workflows using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Event-Driven Ansible. Through a series of practical lab exercises, you’ll respond to a live security vulnerability from initial alert to safe remediation. You will build and test automated pipelines across three core phases: Defend: Instantly isolate affected services, contain threats, and revoke compromised credentials using event-driven triggers the moment a vulnerability is detected. Contain: Apply critical patches quickly using policy-gated workflows that run safety checks and gather necessary approvals before changes touch production. Comply: Enforce continuous security guardrails by packaging hardened configurations into scanned, audit-ready deployments that satisfy compliance standards. Whether you manage enterprise infrastructure or oversee security operations, you will leave this session with actionable techniques to slash your Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) while keeping your environment safe and compliant.

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.

Datacenter virtualization migration and AI implementation don’t have to be managed as separate IT projects or remain as isolated clusters. Modernization for operational efficiency and AI deployment can be pursued in a digestible and unifying way, resulting in ready-for-AI, energy-friendly and memory-efficient designs. Red Hat software platforms deployed over AMD-enabled compute, storage and networking systems offer the widest span of modern enterprise infrastructure available, simplifying staff training, manageability, scale, and resiliency. In this session, AMD will walk you through emerging enterprise computing functions, the Red Hat stacks that enable them, giving you the insight needed to help plan your ideal datacenter operation of the future, implementable now. You will leave with a planning roadmap you can use internally to help begin your modernization process.

85% of CEOs now say cybersecurity is critical to business growth. And yet, for most organizations, digital sovereignty remains exactly that — a declaration. Policies are written. Commitments are made. But in complex, hybrid, multi-cloud environments, the gap between what leadership intends and what IT can actually enforce at scale is where sovereign control quietly breaks down. The same logic that drives Zero Trust applies here: you cannot assume control. You have to verify and enforce it — continuously, consistently, and at the speed threats actually move. As AI-driven attack frameworks identify and exploit vulnerabilities faster than any manual security team can respond, organizations that rely on human-paced operations to maintain their sovereign posture are, in effect, not sovereign at all. This session makes the business case for automation as the operational backbone of digital sovereignty. We'll show how Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform closes the gap between intent and execution — enforcing compliance continuously, coordinating response across security and IT teams, and giving leadership the audit trails and governance controls needed to prove sovereign posture, not just claim it. Sovereignty isn't something you achieve. It's something you operate

Every large-scale technology rollout needs a spark, someone who believes in the vision and rallies others to make it real. But what happens when early efforts stall, or when the partnership between teams hits roadblocks? Join Tailored Brands as they share a real-world story about driving automation and standardization across a diverse hybrid cloud environment spanning on-premises data centers, GCP, and AWS. While this session highlights the collaboration, persistence, and partnership that made the project successful, it also delves into the technical foundations behind deploying Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) at scale. You’ll hear how one internal champion joined forces with Red Hat’s account team to turn past implementation struggles into a scalable automation success story. Together, they re-architected legacy systems, transitioned from Rundeck to containerized Ansible environments, and built a foundation for broader adoption across the enterprise. We’ll walk through ● The Initial Challenge: Modernizing and scaling automation beyond existing limits. ● The Turning Point: How the Red Hat partnership provided the right training, guidance, and technical alignment to accelerate adoption. ● The Playbook: Practical lessons any organization can use to identify internal champions and build productive relationships that drive long-term transformation. By the end of this session, you’ll leave with a clearer view of how to cultivate strong Red Hat partnerships and empower internal advocates to guide your automation journey, proving that when collaboration leads, technology follows.

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. 

"You've built the playbooks. You've got the automation running. Now everyone's asking about agentic AI — and you're trying to figure out what that actually means for the infrastructure you're responsible for keeping stable and secure. In this session, we'll explore the concept of multimode automation: a practical framework for understanding how task-driven, event-driven, and AI-driven automation can be orchestrated as a trusted execution layer for IT operations teams. We'll dig into how Red Hat Ansible empowers your team to implement a truly “governance-first” approach to automation, and why the guardrails you've already built matter more than ever in the agentic AI era. If you're an automator trying to figure out where AI actually fits without breaking what's already working, this session is for you.