Red Hat launches Advanced Developer Suite with focus on AI

Red Hat has announced the launch of Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite, a new addition to its OpenShift platform aimed at improving developer productivity and application security while supporting the integration of Red Hat AI technologies.

Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite is designed to address two key priorities in modern software engineering: increasing developer productivity and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into applications. A recent Gartner survey cited in Red Hat's announcement found that integration of AI and boosting developer productivity are among the top three strategic goals for software engineering departments in 2024, both registering at 48%.

The suite provides tools enabling platform engineering and development teams to collaborate on creating "golden paths"—software templates that transparently deliver infrastructure, application services, toolchains, and policy best practices. These templates aim to help developers deliver applications with greater speed and security, and now include software templates from Red Hat AI.

The offering combines several components, notably the Red Hat Developer Hub. This internal developer portal, based on Backstage, the open source framework from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, now features an upgraded AI-centric user experience. This includes pre-configured software templates for common AI use cases, deployable on Red Hat OpenShift AI.

Other elements of the suite include Red Hat Trusted Profile Analyzer, which manages software bills of materials (SBOMs), vulnerability exploitability exchanges (VEX), and common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). This tool is intended to provide risk intelligence to developers and DevSecOps teams.

Red Hat Trusted Artifact Signer is another feature, offering production-ready software artifact signing and verification through the Sigstore project. This capability now extends to AI models packaged in OCI format, aiming to ensure only trusted models are deployed in production environments.

Integration with a range of existing Red Hat tools and third-party offerings allows organisations to incorporate the suite into current workflows. This includes Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines, Red Hat OpenShift GitOps, and other continuous integration and delivery solutions. Tools such as the migration toolkit for applications, Podman Desktop, and Red Hat IDE Plugins can further enhance developer velocity and help streamline the development and migration of software.

The Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces environment enables developers to access a cloud development environment that includes the necessary tooling, templates, and security requirements embedded into the process, supporting efficient onboarding for developers and contractors.

Security is a central focus, with Red Hat positioning the Advanced Developer Suite as a way to combine speed and efficiency with robust supply chain protection. Integrating Trusted Artifact Signer and Trusted Profile Analyzer is designed to help organisations detect potential security vulnerabilities early and maintain oversight throughout the software development lifecycle. These tools are intended to create an audit trail for software development activities, which can inform decisions on risk and provide actionable intelligence regarding the software supply chain's security posture.

Developers seeking to incorporate AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), into their applications face a range of challenges, according to Red Hat. The suite's integrations with Red Hat AI Inference Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), and Red Hat OpenShift AI aim to address these, enabling the development of AI-enabled and cloud-native applications with an enhanced security focus.

The Red Hat Developer Hub within the suite includes AI-focused software templates designed for scenarios such as chatbots, audio-to-text, object detection, code generation, and retrieval-augmented generation. These templates intend to provide a supported, pre-architected path for developers, without the need to deeply understand all of the underlying AI technology. An upcoming AI landing page will further assist developers in getting started.

Mike Barrett, Vice President of Hybrid Platforms at Red Hat, commented on the launch: "We are excited about the release of Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite as it brings together several solutions in a manner that will allow our customers faster use of the technologies. It pivots the focus towards developer productivity by way of platform engineering technologies for your largest platform investments. In addition to that focus, we have also been able to turn those technologies and developer experiences towards integrating with Red Hat AI solutions. Speed, security and AI innovation should never be mutually exclusive. We feel by tightly integrating Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite with the rest of the Red Hat portfolio and open source ecosystems we will ensure speed, security and AI innovation are always top of mind."