Red Hat Summit: Connect 2026 San Jose, California

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; and 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.

In an era of hybrid cloud complexity, securing the boundary between virtualized and containerized workloads is a critical challenge. This session examines how Isovalent Networking for Virtualization, integrated with Cisco Nexus One fabrics, establishes a unified, high-performance security posture. By unifying networking and security across Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Kubernetes, we eliminate the blind spots that often arise when managing disparate workload environments. We will demonstrate how to enforce consistent, defense-in-depth policies across your entire footprint, ensuring your infrastructure is resilient by design. Topics included: unified Policy Enforcement: How virtual machines and containers share a single, hardened networking and security layer, removing the risks associated with siloed infrastructure; secure Workload Mobility: Leveraging the Isovalent Network Bridge to transition workloads between VMware and Kubernetes environments without compromising IP identity or security integrity; and robust Fabric Security: Implementing EVPN-based integration with Cisco Nexus One to achieve deep, multi-tenant network segmentation, ensuring your infrastructure remains isolated and resilient against lateral movement threats. Attendees will leave with a clear roadmap for integrating these technologies to modernize their security architecture and strengthen their defense-in-depth posture.

our 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

Red Hat AI spotlight offers a deep-dive into one of Red Hat’s core platforms, helping you “double click” into what you learned in keynotes. Join this session to discover how Red Hat AI provides a robust platform to accelerate the deployment and management of agentic AI workflows enabling organizations to deploy and manage autonomous systems that perceive, decide, act, and learn to achieve complex goals. We’ll explore how Red Hat AI delivers the ultimate in flexibility and control, allowing you to run your AI, where you want, and how you want to, from the infrastructure, all the way to the agents. What you will learn and see: Real-World Scale: Hear how some of our customers use this foundational AI platform to accelerate predictive and generative AI. Discover how they empower their data scientists and AI engineers with self-service environments so they can deploy , host, manage, monitor, lifecycle AI-powered and agentic applications, at scale; and Live Demos: Our demos will illustrate both the existing and latest features of the Red Hat AI, such as model selection, deployment, guardrailing, as well as examples of common patterns, such as Models-as-a-Service. And we will focus on practical, real-world AI use cases, inspired from our customers.

ServiceNow and Red Hat are addressing one of IT operations' most persistent challenges: Isolated automation assets and redundant problem-solving efforts. By integrating ServiceNow's LEAP platform with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the partnership creates an intelligent automation fabric that uses AI/ML to automatically surface relevant automation solutions when and where they're needed most. This collaboration transforms how enterprises can handle IT incidents by intelligently matching ServiceNow-logged issues with proven Ansible Playbooks and templates. The result is dramatic time savings—reducing resolution times from days to minutes by eliminating the need for multiple escalations and redundant troubleshooting. IT teams gain immediate access to automation solutions that already exist within their organization, ending the cycle of reinventing fixes for recurring problems. The integration brings the power of enterprise automation directly into the ServiceNow workflow, enabling operators to resolve issues faster and more efficiently than ever before.

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.

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.

It's 2026. If an organization hasn't built an Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) by now, is it already too late… or is it actually the perfect moment to begin? In this session, Daniel Goosen, CTO of Red Hat Premier Partner Level Up Technology LLC, explores why the Automation CoE continues to earn its place in every cloud-native organization’s strategy; examines the five stages of automation maturity; outlines an operating model for a successful CoE; and shares lessons learned in the field while helping organizations design, implement, and operationalize automation with clear, quantifiable ROI. Along the way he'll also highlight the capabilities that Level Up’s clients are most excited about with the new AAP 2.7, including self-service enhancements, AI-assisted workflows, custom execution environments, improved governance, and other platform capabilities helping many Red Hat customers move beyond isolated silos and toward enterprise-wide automation success stories. Attendees should leave with a practical framework for evaluating your current automation maturity, pro tips for building a sustainable Automation CoE in the age of Generative AI, and a better understanding of where specialized expertise can accelerate your success, by combining the right technology investments with deeply-specialized professional services and time- and cost-efficient IT staff training options, all of which create optimal outcomes for customers to become self-sufficient with their automation initiatives over the long term.

The shift from experimental AI to deploying enterprise AI at scale requires a fundamentally new software and hardware architecture. This session explores the expansion of the Red Hat and NVIDIA collaboration, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA. We will detail how this specialized edition provides Day 0 support for new NVIDIA accelerated computing platforms, providing a hardened foundation for future AI and computationally dense workloads. Next, we will dive into the full-stack integration that defines the Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA. This new enterprise AI factory solution combines Red Hat AI Enterprise and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software capabilities, with support for NVIDIA’s latest accelerated computing platforms. You’ll hear how this full-stack AI factory solution transforms the ad-hoc creation, customization, and deployment of AI experiments into a repeatable, scalable, and safe-guarded process for production deployments.

Tired of the endless cycle of scanning and patching CVEs in your production container environments? Project Hummingbird is Red Hat's next-generation initiative to fundamentally change the way application dependencies are packaged and delivered.This deep dive focuses on how we're leveraging years of containerization expertise to create ultra-minimalist, hardened, distroless container images for high-value open source languages, frameworks, and application components. We'ill not only unpack the innovative technology and automated build processes behind Hummingbird, but also provide actionable insights into:Security: How a dramatically smaller attack surface translates into a near-zero CVE count in your base images.Efficiency: The performance benefits of using images stripped down to only the essential components.Production readiness: Real-world use cases, integration examples, and tips and tricks for deploying and operating these minimal images at scale.Attendees will leave equipped to level-up their container security posture and accelerate their organization's shift-left security strategy.

For over a decade, Red Hat OpenShift has empowered thousands of customers and forged hundreds of strategic partnerships, establishing itself as a cornerstone of innovation and reliability in container orchestration and hybrid cloud application deployment. Join this roadmap session for an exclusive preview of what’s next in Red Hat OpenShift. Discover how OpenShift will bring agentic AI into the platform to simplify operations, accelerate troubleshooting, enhance upgrades, and improve day‑to‑day efficiency. Learn about support for post‑quantum cryptography, native multi‑cluster capabilities, extended lifecycles, and digital sovereignty. Learn how Red Hat OpenShift is evolving into an intelligent application platform for containers, virtual machines (VMs), and AI/ML workloads, with built-in capabilities that streamline development, build, deployment, and management across hybrid cloud environments. Explore how Red Hat OpenShift continues to be your catalyst for innovation, agility, and success in the rapidly evolving digital ecosystem.

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.