Red Hat Summit: Connect 2026 Chicago, Illinois

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.

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.

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.

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.

As organizations scale their AI initiatives, the hidden costs of foundational models can quickly become a barrier to innovation. "From Tokens to Tokenomics" explores how businesses can move beyond the "one-size-fits-all" approach  by implementing a hybrid architecture strategy. This session provides solutions patterns to  identify the right architecture for the right use case, balancing performance, governance, cost and efficiency. We will introduce a maturity model for AI adoption, demonstrating how enterprises can adopt new hybrid architectures including  close models and open models to optimize internal infrastructure for specific use cases. Through five concrete use cases, attendees will learn how to design flexible, high-performance architectures that deliver measurable business value while maintaining operational control and governance. Whether you are an executive planning your mid-year budget, an AI Platform Engineer, an AI Engineer, optimizing or consuming inference.  session offers the quantitative, real use cases to bring insights to build a scalable and efficient AI stack.

Red Hat’s edge solutions transform the complex, fragmented reality of edge computing—characterized by manual maintenance, security risks, and operational silos—into a scalable, consistent, and automated infrastructure. By integrating open-source technologies like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, MicroShift, and Ansible, this platform allows businesses to manage remote devices with the efficiency of centralized data centers, bridging the gap between IT and operational technology. Learn how organizations shift the focus from merely managing infrastructure challenges to leveraging edge data for real-time innovation, such as AI-driven predictive maintenance and autonomous operations, all while reducing costs and avoiding the constraints of vendor lock-in.

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.

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, Solutions Architects, and technical decision makers planning their datacenter modernization and cloud-native journey. 

As AI-driven vulnerability discovery outpaces human remediation, organizations need more than an operating system—they need a closed-loop remediation partner. Red Hat’s “See it, Stage it, Ship it” approach brings together Red Hat Lightspeed, Satellite, and Ansible Automation Platform as a single, supported portfolio on a hardened Red Hat Enterprise Linux foundation. That helps teams offload much of the work of triaging and patching CVEs, so they can keep pace with AI-scale discovery, reduce downtime, and focus on their core business.

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.

AI coding assistants have boosted individual developer output by 30% — yet organizational throughput has barely moved. Meanwhile, production quality is declining and time-to-exploit for new vulnerabilities is approaching zero. More output isn’t more outcome. This session explores why the gap exists and how to close it with a trusted software supply chain strategy that spans the full software development lifecycle — not just code generation. We’ll walk through how the OpenShift Application Platform enables a trusted agentic SDLC with grounded context, hermetic builds, cryptographic signing, policy-gated deployments, and progressive delivery — all agent-neutral by design. You’ll see Red Hat’s own results as customer zero (200 build systems → ~10, vulnerability remediation in 24 hours, 2M+ artifacts shipped) and leave with a practical framework for assessing where your organization sits on the agentic SDLC spectrum and what to do next.