Red Hat OpenShift: Sovereign AI, Migration, and Virtualization

Red Hat has announced several new features for OpenShift. A key focus is on sovereign AI and cloud services. To achieve this, Red Hat is adopting a service provisioning approach that allows partners and customers to deploy virtual machines, clusters, GPU resources, and inference services within controlled operational boundaries.

The operational model is paramount: Who operates the platform, where do data and telemetry reside, and how are compliance proofs generated? To ensure code, operational data, and workloads remain within defined boundaries, Red Hat points to hardware-assisted confidential containers, confidential hosts, trusted supply chain features, and OpenShift Dev Spaces, among other things.

Furthermore, Red Hat plans a regional deployment of RHEL software and update streams for Europe, allowing customers and partners to obtain Red Hat Enterprise Linux locally. This is intended to increase the resilience of critical software supply chains and reduce inter-regional dependencies. Red Hat also highlights its Confirmed Sovereign Support in the EU, a support model with regionally controlled escalation and operational processes.

Bare metal as a service, developer support, and Trusted Environments

With Bare Metal as a Service, Red Hat aims to manage physical servers via OpenShift in the future. This further develops OpenShift towards a general infrastructure platform – not only for cloud-native applications but also for traditional workloads and hardware within a unified operational model.

For developers, Red Hat Desktop has been announced. This environment is intended to connect Linux, Windows, and Mac clients with Red Hat platforms and support secure development processes from the local machine to productive OpenShift and AI environments. It is based on Podman Desktop, supplemented by a catalog of hardened images. Developers should be able to easily use tested images locally and then deploy them to OpenShift.

Additionally, there will be a trusted software factory and trusted libraries. The factory is based on CNCF technologies and Red Hat best practices for software supply chains. It is designed to help companies build processes with provenance, attestation, and traceable artifacts. Trusted libraries provide curated and continuously maintained libraries. According to Red Hat, these are built in a SLSA Level 3 infrastructure and contain complete provenance and attestation information.

Ongoing Topic: Migration and Virtualization

The new Migration Advisor is intended to help evaluate existing virtualization environments before workloads are moved to OpenShift. The tool is based on experience from the Virtualization Migration Assessment. Customers can use it to passively analyze their environment and receive early indications of effort, risks, and migration paths.

OpenShift Virtualization is being enhanced with a feature for live migration of virtual machines between Kubernetes clusters. Additionally, new right-sizing functions are intended to help utilize storage and compute resources more effectively. “Most customers want to utilize existing infrastructure more densely rather than immediately procuring new systems. Therefore, OpenShift will increasingly show where virtual machines are oversized and where cluster capacities can be used more efficiently,” says Mike Barrett, Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat Hybrid Platforms, about the background of the new features.

Virtualization has become an important business area for Red Hat. At the summit, a growth of 417 percent in virtual machines with OpenShift Virtualization for the 2025/2026 period was mentioned. Barrett also spoke of 70 percent more customer accounts in this area. These figures indicate that the offering is well-received in the market, especially where companies are seeking alternatives or supplements to traditional virtualization.

(fo)