TL;DR:
- Red Hat partners with IBM’s watsonx Code Assistant to enhance Ansible Lightspeed IT automation.
- The collaboration offers purpose-built tools for cloud, data center, and on-premise automation.
- Lightspeed with watsonx accelerates automation code development, reducing hours to minutes.
- It empowers both experienced coders and novices, democratizing Ansible content creation.
- The initiative promotes transparency with content source matching and contributor recognition.
- Market impact: Reduces IT teams’ development time, fosters trust in AI-generated code, and opens doors for innovation.
Main AI News:
Red Hat has joined forces with IBM’s generative artificial intelligence (genAI), known as watsonx Code Assistant, to create a powerful toolset that promises to revolutionize automation in IT environments. This innovative collaboration integrates seamlessly with the Ansible Lightspeed IT automation platform, providing developers with a suite of tools designed to streamline the creation and testing of automation code for cloud, data center, and on-premise infrastructures. However, it’s important to note that this partnership offers much more than just a language model, as Red Hat’s Chief Ansible Architect, Matthew Jones, explained to SDxCentral.
Unlike general-purpose large language models (LLMs), Lightspeed with watsonx leverages Red Hat’s deep technical expertise in developing the tools and plugins used by Ansible developers. This, combined with the advantages of a purpose-built language model, results in a commercial offering that is laser-focused on automation, specifically tailored for Ansible automation. According to Jones, “We’re bringing a commercial offering that’s highly targeted at automation, specifically Ansible automation.”
Now available for general use, this service is poised to significantly enhance the efficiency of IT teams tasked with writing automation code. Instead of dedicating hours or even days to these tasks, Lightspeed with watsonx can reduce that timeframe to mere minutes, according to the vendors. The immediate benefits of this AI tool are expected to resonate with most enterprises, particularly in terms of speeding up the automation code development process and instilling confidence in both the automation itself and the skills of the IT teams. Moreover, the service facilitates the implementation of best practices and ensures organization-wide code maintenance to foster consistent automation.
Harnessing GenAI for Automation Excellence
With Lightspeed’s capabilities, users can input prompts such as “Configure my firewall to open X ports” or “Create an EC2 instance with 2 CPUs and 4 GB of memory” and receive code recommendations generated by IBM’s watsonx AI Code Assistant. These prompts can also be employed to create and modify Ansible Playbooks—a vital component for managing configurations and deploying complex applications across multiple machines. As Jones aptly put it, “If you need to execute a task with Ansible more than once, write a playbook and put it under source control. Then you can use the playbook to push out a new configuration or confirm the configuration of remote systems.”
Thanks to a straightforward text prompt, users can effortlessly obtain AI-generated output that is translated into YAML code, significantly expediting the process of crafting an Ansible Playbook. For seasoned coders, this innovation substantially boosts productivity, while for novices, it lowers barriers to entry, democratizing the ability to create content with Ansible.
Championing Open Source Principles
In line with Red Hat’s commitment to transparency and its embrace of open source values, the service features content source matching, providing insight into the potential sources, authors, and licenses that contributed to the training data used for code recommendations. Recognizing contributors for their contributions is a key aspect of this initiative, which aims to bolster trust in AI-generated code among IT teams. Upstream contributors even have the option to exclude their work from model fine-tuning.
This emphasis on transparency not only empowers users but also encourages community members to explore new use cases and drive innovation forward. Richard Henshall, Head of Ansible Product Management at Red Hat, emphasized the transformative potential of this approach, stating, “Empowered users and teams no longer rely on others to make moves; they will make it happen, because they can.”
Availability and Accessibility
The commercial version of Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed is available through a subscription, while the IBM watsonx Code Assistant can be obtained separately. The good news is that getting started is hassle-free—all you need is VSCode with the Ansible plugin installed to unleash the power of this service, as Jones succinctly noted.
Conclusion:
The integration of Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM genAI watsonx Code Assistant represents a significant leap forward in IT automation. By dramatically reducing the time and effort required to develop automation code, this collaboration empowers IT teams to work more efficiently and confidently. The emphasis on transparency and community engagement fosters trust and innovation, making it a compelling offering in the market for automation solutions.
