Enabling AI at the edge with Red Hat Ansible Inside

IDC predicts that by 2026, 75% of large enterprises will rely on AI-infused processes to enhance asset efficiency, streamline supply chains, and improve product quality across diverse and distributed environments¹. At Red Hat, we know there is an additional component that is critical to driving AI-enabled applications at the edge – automation. 

This week, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Device Edge, which now includes Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to help organizations more effectively automate and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux and MicroShift workloads at the edge. However, beyond delivering consistency and reliability at the platform level, Red Hat is focused on enabling its partner ecosystem with the tools and resources they need to successfully deliver automation capabilities across a range of use cases. 

Red Hat Ansible Inside is an offering for Red Hat partners to more easily embed Ansible Playbook execution inside their application products, enabling automation capabilities and components without the infrastructure or management overhead. This can be particularly helpful for AI and edge use cases to automate processes and tasks for those mission-critical, hard-to-reach locations. 

Turnkey Ansible automation

Red Hat Ansible Inside uses an embedded software development kit (eSDK) that allows application teams to more quickly and easily integrate Ansible automation functionality. This offers a more accessible and affordable solution for partners that are interested in implementing automation as part of their application but may not require all the capabilities of Ansible Automation Platform. 

With Red Hat Ansible Inside, partner application teams can develop, monitor and manage applications across even the most complex infrastructure without the added constraint to their budget and IT department. Furthermore, for Red Hat partners, Red Hat Ansible Inside offers an opportunity to more easily introduce customers to Ansible automation and pave the way for future business opportunities. 

Red Hat Ansible Inside baked into an application allows organizations to leverage the extensive ecosystem of partners that surround Ansible. For example, there are more than 150 certified Ansible Content Collections created by partners. For application developers, this means they can focus on the core capabilities of an application rather than spending precious time developing integrations and automating devices, software or assets that are supported by Red Hat and its certified partners. Red Hat Ansible Inside utilizes the same automation components found in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, which is tried, tested and optimized to the same levels as other Red Hat products..

What does this mean for AI-enabled applications at the edge? In order to successfully run AI at the edge, many organizations may need to modernize their edge IT resources and processes to support the demands of AI applications. Automation can help them do that more consistently and faster. 

Ansible Inside in action with Guise AI

Guise AI is a Red Hat partner that delivers state-of-the-art AI solutions running at the device edge to solve real-world customer problems. While many Guise AI customers are eager to enable their applications with AI, it became difficult for Guise AI to keep up with the demand of deploying and managing customer applications at the necessary scale. Guise AI explored other infrastructure software solutions and Kubernetes, which required too much manual oversight and was too bulky to run on the small edge devices supporting the AI-enabled applications. 

Ultimately, Guise AI determined that Red Hat Ansible Inside was the best solution to support Guise EdgeOps – its new edge platform built with Red Hat Device Edge and Ansible Inside that is designed to manage remote edge devices and deploy AI edge workloads in a secure environment. Using Red Hat Ansible Inside, Guise AI is able to deliver an intuitive no-code platform for enterprises deploying AI workloads at the edge. 

The three tenants of Guise EdgeOps are scalability, flexibility and security and Red Hat Device Edge is critical to helping achieve each of these. Data at the edge is increasingly vulnerable with the rapid growth in the number of devices and the EdgeOps platform from Guise AI leverages state-of-the-art encryption technologies built into Red Hat Device Edge (LUKS, Tang and Clevis) to accomplish Network-Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE) for safeguarding data at rest. 

Another challenge is ensuring that all devices are properly updated with security patches. Because each device has its processor and memory, it can be difficult to push updates out to all devices promptly across a fleet of devices. This can leave some devices vulnerable to attack even after patches have been released from other devices. Guise EdgeOps with Ansible Inside is able to help push back these updates to heterogeneous devices at scale. 

Learn more about Red Hat Ansible Inside here and get started today.