Meet OpenShift Lightspeed, RedHat's AI tool for Kubernetes admins

Are you a Kubernetes master? OK, you don't need to read the rest of this article. But if, like most of us, you have trouble managing Kubernetes clusters, you'll be interested to know that Red Hat has announced the developer preview release of OpenShift Lightspeed. 

Also: How Red Hat is embracing AI to make sysadmins' lives easier

Lightspeed is a generative AI-based virtual assistant that integrates into OpenShift, Red Hat's Kubernetes distribution. This new tool aims to enhance the productivity and efficiency of development teams by simplifying complex IT tasks through advanced AI capabilities.

The Lightspeed service, which uses natural language processing (NLP) to turn prompts into code, first appeared in the Ansible DevOps program, where it helped to simplify complex system administration jobs. In particular, it was designed to demystify the creation of Ansible Playbooks.

This latest take combines IBM Research's open-source-licensed Granite large language model (LLM) family, the LAB methodology-based InstructLab alignment tools, and a collaborative approach to model development via the InstructLab project.

What does that mean for you? Lightspeed can help you deploy, manage, and maintain your OpenShift Kubernetes clusters. It also comes with an intuitive, AI-powered assistant that is Integrated directly into the OpenShift console.

Also: Can AI even be open source? It's complicated

Lightspeed uses a chat-style interface to help you with tasks such as troubleshooting, investigating cluster resources, and more. By leveraging Red Hat's extensive knowledge and experience in building, deploying, and managing applications across the hybrid cloud, the company said, Lightspeed aims to make users more accurate and efficient, freeing up IT teams to focus on innovation rather than day-to-day manual tasks. 

The primary goal of OpenShift Lightspeed is to help users get up to speed with OpenShift as quickly as possible. For instance, users can ask the assistant how to install the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization operator and receive step-by-step guidance. Lightspeed also can assist with configuring pods to scale automatically, providing the necessary YAML code to get started.

One of Lightspeed's standout features is its ability to attach objects from a cluster to answer specific questions about them, including object YAML, selected logs, and relevant events. While Lightspeed cannot interrogate the cluster directly, it can help you understand cluster resources by providing commands and supporting links to official documentation.

The developer preview of OpenShift Lightspeed is now available for download. To get started, users need a Red Hat OpenShift 4.15 (or above) cluster and a subscription to one of the following LLM providers: IBM WatsonX.ai, Microsoft Azure OpenAI, or OpenAI. Using chat and text summarization models like GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and granite-13b-chat will provide the best results.

To sum up, Red Hat Lightspeed is meant to make your life easier as a Kubernetes administrator. Considering how hard it is to be a Kubernetes maven -- there's a reason why, according to Talent.com, entry-level Kubernetes engineer salaries start at $125,000/year -- this AI Kubernetes aid sounds good to me.