UPDATED 16:20 EDT / JUNE 01 2023

AI

Exploring the future of software supply chain: Red Hat’s Sigstore initiative

Emerging technologies include a variety of innovations such as information technology, nanotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

Red Hat Inc. has created long-term investments from the office of the CTO. Emerging Technologies and other Red Hat internal departments are creating new projects, such as Kelper, to combat the current resource usage needed to complete automated tasks. 

“This is a project that’s basically about correlating power usage and consumption down to various, like the application and just different components within the application,” Stephen Watt, distinguished engineer and head of the office of the chief technology officer at Red Hat, said. “So, you really sort of know what’s consuming the most power, and then you’re able to take that information and make smart scheduling decisions to have things run more optimally in other places.” 

As the explosion of AI and ChatGPT continues throughout the industry, the majority of software infrastructures are proprietary. With Red Hat being a leading open-source software company, their desire and curiosity to apply the benefits of open source to AI is coming to fruition.

“And so I think, to me, that’s actually an area where Red Hat’s looking at getting more involved in the office of the CTO, and in our emerging technologies group is specifically trying to accelerate the open large language models as well as the smaller models,” Watt said.

Watt spoke with theCUBE industry analyst  John Furrier and Rob Strechay at Red Hat Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Red Hat seeks to optimize resource usage in automated tasks by correlating power usage and consumption, while also focusing on applying the benefits of open source to AI and accelerating open large language models. (* Disclosure below.)

Projects on the Roadmap

The future of the newest Red Hat project, Kepler, is making progress by reducing error rates. In parallel, quantum has momentum in the roadmap as well.  Watt believes that post-quantum cryptography is the ability of a quantum computer one day being able to crack current encryption. He also commented on another project, Sigstore. 

“If you look at Kubernetes as the nucleus of the cloud-native ecosystem, Sigstore is the nucleus of the secure software supply chain ecosystem, that’s a big one,” Watt said. “That was created and invented in our team at Red Hat. So, I think Kepler is our new hit.”

The office of the CTO is working diligently to provide relatable services to their customers through a transparent process. The team’s primary function is pathfinding: a collaborative group helping to define the future.

“We’re also an engineering group that basically runs all the prototypes to sort of iterate up using the empirical method to get to validate our hypotheses. And so some of this is emerging technologies where we’re actually building the prototypes,” Watt added.

Transparency is key in open-source software and platforms. In this regard, Red Hat has a one-stop view of its roadmap available to the public.

“We have like emerging technologies, it is a website called next.redhat.com,” Watt said. “So, you can go there and see what they’re working on.” 

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit:

(* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over the content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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