Red Hat Summit: Connect 2026 Jacksonville, Florida

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.

Dive into how Dell Private Cloud deploying Red Hat OpenShift streamlines operations and accelerates delivery. This technical session highlights blueprint-driven workflows, automated operations, and integration best practices that simplify cluster management at scale. See live demos and gain real-world insights to optimize your OpenShift environment and reduce operational complexity.

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.

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; and 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.

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 hybrid and disconnected environments become the operational norm, organizations need consistent, data-driven ways to manage risk, performance, and cost across Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift—regardless of where workloads run. In this session, we’ll share the product roadmap for Red Hat Lightspeed, our AI-driven operational assistant. Red Hat Lightspeed is the evolution of Red Hat Insights analytics, and supports both cloud-connected and fully on-premise deployments. We’ll discuss how: to use Red Hat Lightspeed through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to deliver analysis and recommendations into restricted or offline environments; Red Hat Lightspeed integrates with Red Hat Satellite to support patch, compliance, and lifecycle workflows; and on-premise cost management capabilities for Red Hat OpenShift can help teams understand utilization and optimize resource spend without sending data off-site.

Public cloud adoption is showing no signs of slowing down with continued growth in 2025 driven by modernization initiatives. Red Hat’s unique hybrid cloud capabilities allow organizations to take advantage of the scale and flexibility of the public cloud, while maintaining and modernizing critical, often legacy, on-premise applications. Join us for this roadmap session to hear from the OpenShift cloud services product team about the latest cloud capabilities and what’s coming next. We’ll discuss: new capabilities and innovation around virtualization in cloud environments; security features and compliance standards; architecture improvements with hosted control planes, tools for more efficient AI/ML and more. This session will be structured as a high-level strategic briefing, concluding with an opportunity to ask questions live and get them answered. We will address your questions about Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud, and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, and you'll leave with a clear understanding of how to plan your cloud investments.

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.