Steampunk take on Red Hat Summit 2025

From May 19–22 , Boston hosted this year’s Red Hat Summit and Ansible Fest—an open-source technology gathering that brought together Red Hat and Ansible enthusiasts from around the world. With a dynamic mix of live sessions, hands-on labs, product roadmaps, and partner ecosystem presentations, Red Hat Summit attendees had the chance to learn what’s next for the future of open source.

We were thrilled to be there as a proud sponsor and active member of the Ansible community, sharing insights, exchanging ideas, and enjoying conversations with industry peers.

Unlock What’s Next

This year’s Red Hat Summit 2025 showcased major innovations across enterprise Linux, virtualization, and AI that are shaping the future of IT.

Red Hat unveiled Enterprise Linux 10, which offers a container-native approach to OS management and an AI-powered assistant, designed to help sysadmins become more productive. These innovations simplify operations and prepare organizations for a hybrid cloud future.

Virtualization also took center stage, with OpenShift Virtualization experiencing rapid adoption. Enterprises are migrating thousands of virtual machines to this platform to achieve cost efficiencies and modernize their infrastructure while maintaining compatibility with existing tools.

AI was a major highlight — from Red Hat’s new AI Inference Server enabling flexible deployment of AI models across hybrid environments, to partnerships focused on optimizing model performance and resource utilization. This dual approach empowers enterprises to innovate with confidence and integrate AI alongside traditional and containerized workloads.

Community Breakout Session: Turning Automation into Strategic Advantage

We kicked off the event with our community breakout session, where Gregor Berginc (XLAB Steampunk) and Matt Millard (Principal Financial Group) shared how Principal used Steampunk Spotter to streamline their automation journey.

The main challenge for this company in the insurance and financial services sector was to modernize their automation code to achieve secure, standardized, and scalable Ansible automation. Key challenges included migrating from Ansible 2.9 and Tower to Ansible 2.15 and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform—while ensuring robust automation, security, and compliance at scale.

Rather than relying on time-consuming manual updates, Principal chose an automated approach. With Spotter, they were able to assess the compatibility of existing playbooks, identify deprecated modules and syntax issues, get recommended replacements, and generate actionable advice to refactor code while maintaining functionality.

Beyond modernization, they implemented continuous code scanning for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, enforced organizational and regulatory standards with custom checks, and embedded security policies directly into their playbook development process.

Key outcomes include:

• Reducing migration risks and accelerating playbook development

• Empowering junior engineers to manage playbook code even with limited Ansible knowledge

• Improving performance and security—boosting overall ROI

• Creating a repeatable, validated process for production-ready automation

In numbers: over 7,000 scan results, thousands of flagged issues, 3,000 automated task rewrites, and 550 hours saved with Spotter’s automated approach.

The session was a practical example of how automation, when implemented thoughtfully, can reduce the time spent on manual tasks and give engineers more time to innovate.

Highlights of the Ansible Keynote

The keynotes expanded the discussion and offered insights, practical examples and an outlook on the future of open-source automation. Here are some standout moments.

Where Innovation Meets Reliability:
Swift, AAP and the Power of 99.999% Uptime

Suvasish Ghosh (Swift) and Aidan Mattson (Swift) opened Ansible Fest with a demonstration of how Swift relies on the Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) to manage mission-critical systems. When less than five minutes of downtime per year is the standard, there is no room for manual error. The message was clear: automation is not just an efficiency improvement; it’s a necessity for operational excellence.

The keynote continued with the introduction of the new Automation Dashboard by Sean Cavanaugh (Red Hat) and Kaete Piccirilli (Red Hat). The dashboard provides a tangible way to communicate the impact of automation on the business from time savings to cost reductions. We’re proud to have collaborated with the Ansible team to bring this vision to life to deliver the biggest wins—turning insights into action.

Scaling Smart: Innovation Within Boundaries

One of the keynote sessions focused on innovation within the boundaries of compliance. Anderson Tran (Wells Fargo) showed how AAP enabled their engineers to “be creative while complying with regulatory requirements.”

Ashesh Badani’s (Red Hat) presentation took a broader look at the growing skills gap in the industry and backed it up with IDC data. Viktor Principe (PNC) then brought these insights back down to earth with PNC’s “Path to Production” framework—a practical response to the challenge of scaling good ideas into secure, compliant, and operational tools.

Conclusion

The event emphasized a balanced strategy: supporting the current operational needs of businesses while paving the way for emerging technologies. Whether it’s automation, Linux, virtualization, or AI, Red Hat’s comprehensive platform continues to help organizations do more — faster, smarter, and more securely.

The main takeaway? Automation has evolved. It’s no longer just about doing things faster. It’s about doing them smarter and enabling engineers to focus on creative, strategic work while systems take care of the rest. Whether it’s compliance or scaling, platforms like AAP and products like Spotter make it possible to build with confidence and clarity.

We are grateful to be part of this journey and excited to keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible with automation.