Red Hat Summit + AnsibleFest 2025 | Chris Wells, Red Hat

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Chris Wells

Senior Director of Product Marketing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat

play_circle_outline RHEL Lightspeed simplifies deployment for customers with skillset gaps.

play_circle_outline RHEL 10 addresses quantum computing security concerns with quantum-resistant algorithms.

play_circle_outline Red Hat Insights provides advice on building systems and roadmap insights.

play_circle_outline AI optimization in RHEL facilitates efficient use of hardware for AI workloads.

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Chris Wells, Red Hat

Chris Wells

Senior Director of Product Marketing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat

Chris Wells, senior director of product marketing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux at Red Hat, joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight at Red Hat Summit 2025 to reflect on the evolution of RHEL and anticipate future innovations. The discussion blends experience with foresight, from RHEL 6 to the upcoming launch of RHEL 10.

Wells shares highlights from a 17-year journey at Red Hat, detailing innovations such as RHEL Lightspeed, aimed at closing the Linux skills gap through collective intelligence. The conversation also explores how Red Hat is prep... Read more

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What is the advantage of Lightspeed technology in helping customers deploy more workloads on Linux despite a skillset gap? add

What steps are being taken to prepare for the threat quantum computing poses to encryption security? add

What are some of the benefits that have been seen in RHEL 10? add

the AI hardware they are using. add

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Chris Wells, Red Hat

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of Red Hat Summit AnsibleFest 2025, here at the Boston Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside Rob Strechay, my co-host and analyst. Do you know Rob, every once in a while in the show we use terms that sound very science-fictiony, and we're going to talk about one of those terms today, quantum computers.

Rob Strechay

>> Oh, wow.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, right? Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes, going quantum and where they are. Is it real? Is it not real?

Rebecca Knight

>> . Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> All this fun stuff. But what happens after quantum? I think that's where we're going to get to.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exactly. Which... Whoa. With that, I'd like to introduce our next guest. He's Chris Wells, senior director of product marketing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux at Red Hat. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.

Chris Wells

>> Thank you very much for having me here today.

Rebecca Knight

>> And you're repping your team.

Chris Wells

>> I got to rep the merchandise-

Rebecca Knight

>> You look great. Yeah.

Chris Wells

>> It's so exciting for me. I've been with Red Hat for, it'll be 17 years next month.

Rebecca Knight

>> Wow.

Chris Wells

>> I've been through multiple Red Hat Enterprise Linux product releases, was here for 6, 7, 8, 9, and now 10. The show is here, so I like to say this is my marketing budget in action.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, there you go. Exactly. Exactly. Well, I want to start out talking about RHEL Lightspeed before we get to quantum computers. RHEL Lightspeed is built on decades of RHEL-specific knowledge. How does it actually tap into that?

Chris Wells

>> Yeah, I think it's a great question. I mean, I find Lightspeed really an interesting technology because one of the biggest challenges I see when I talk to customers is that they want to deploy more Linux, they want to pour more workloads on Linux in their environments. They don't have enough people, they don't have enough skillset to do it. There's a definite skillset gap there. So, what Lightspeed allows us to do is really take all of the knowledge and expertise that we have inside of Red Hat and really productize that and provide it to customers right at their fingertips. Great example that we're showing this week here at Red Hat Summit is the command line assistant. And it's great for someone like me who's not particularly talented as the marketing guy. I get out there at the command line, I make all kinds of mistakes, all kinds of typos. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm looking at knowledge base articles, man pages, asking all my friends, "What did I do wrong?" Well, now with the command line assistant, I can just simply go in native text, really easy, native language type out, "Hey, what am I trying to do here?" It can look at the context of what I'm trying to do and then come back and tell me, "Here's how you actually do it correctly." So, it's using AI behind the scenes to give me the answers, but the real secret to it is we're able to train all those models on all of our knowledge base articles, on all the support cases that we've had, on all the things we've done over the years, and then provide that right to customers as an assistant.

Rob Strechay

>> You're taking me back, man pages, because I started my life as a Unix admin, under a whole lot of different things, but when I would go and switch to Linux, I would constantly put in the wrong syntax. I was still thinking Unix versus Linux and all of that, and some is similar and some is different, as you would know. But one of the things, and we brought this up with Ashesh a little bit earlier, was again, as quantum becomes more real, people are worried about the security aspects of what that means for algorithms and being able to go forward. You had some announcements as part of RHEL 10 here that really are to help get ahead of that curve, I would say.

Chris Wells

>> Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the core, I'd say, principles of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is having that solid, stable foundation, but security is a real key tenet of making that work. And so, we know a lot of people in their daily jobs are focused on, "What is my security problem today? What's the audit I got to pass? Compliance I've got to get through today?" But we're trying to help customers to look in the future, and we know that quantum computing is just around the corner. We don't know if it's going to become mainstream, let's say in three years, five years, 10 years, you don't know. But once it does happen, it's going to happen fast. So, as an example, when you look at encryption keys today. You look at all the data that's encrypted. We all feel pretty secure that, hey, if I'm following the latest greatest RSA 2048 standards, if I'm looking at those things. Hey, if I tried to crack that encryption with today's computing, the estimates I've heard is it would take like 300 million years or something outrageous to do it. Quantum computing, you could do it in as little as 10 seconds. So, now what do you do with that? You don't know when it's going to hit, but how do you prepare for it? We know there's a lot of bad actors in the world today that are already harvesting data because they want to harvest data that you can't crack and break today, but they want to break in the future when Quantum's available. So, the way that we're helping customers get ahead of that is today in RHEL 10 shipping today, we now have FIPS-compliant modules that have these different quantum-resistant algorithms in there. So, we're working with all the various standards boards and stuff to create those algorithms, so people can incorporate them today. So, even though data's getting stolen today off now a RHEL 10 machine going forward, it's quantum-resistant, so it's not going to be cracked in the same way that all the other data that's out there. So, really more than anything else, trying to help customers stay ahead of the curve.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, staying ahead of the curve, but also help them make sense of and unify this sprawling IT landscape. So, what are some of the benefits that you're seeing?

Chris Wells

>> Well, from RHEL 10 overall, I would say one of the biggest changes that we've really had on the Red Hat side over the last couple of years is that traditionally, if you look at where Linux came from, it was from a Unix to Linux. It was all about the software. It's all about the bits. How do you make the Linux experience just as good, if not better, than what you have from Unix? That's where it's always been. But as I mentioned earlier, the big problem today is not that people don't want to use Linux, they just don't have enough people. So, we've had a lot more focus on how can we fill in a lot of those skills gaps, make it easier to use, manage large things at larger scales? So, I mentioned Lightspeed, that helps with the skills gap piece of it. Other things that we're doing is stuff like image mode. And what image mode allows you to go through and do is that one of the consistent pain points that I'll hear from customers is they hate doing updates, they hate doing upgrades because the way that you do it today is really the same way that you did it 20, 25 years ago with Unix. You've got all these packages, you've got to deploy all of them. You've got all these dependencies. How do you keep track of everything? God forbid something goes wrong, you've got to roll it all back. Very time-intensive, very error-intensive. And so, we looked at it and said, you know what? We solved this problem at the application layer with containers. What if you could take and containerize the operating system? And that's essentially what we've done with image modes. You've containerized the operating system. So, now when you need to update something, you just update that one image, blow it out to your entire fleet. If something happens to be wrong, very easy because it's all immutable, very easy. You don't really even roll it back, you just deploy the old image back into it.

Rob Strechay

>> So, I think that, to me, is one of the keys of the announcements that I was almost buried a little bit on the main stage earlier today. But I think that, to me, the simplicity of it and being able to make sure... In fact another trade publication asked me what I thought was one of the most important. I said, "The RHEL 10 image mode stuff is really important, especially going forward." To your point, it helps get people across that skills gap as well, because it doesn't have to be everybody working on the image, per se, for that. What are some of the other benefits that you see out as people go forward or in RHEL 10 in general?

Chris Wells

>> Well, we really have five key themes around it. We've got the skills gap piece of it with Lightspeed, the image mode piece that really you don't have to worry about drift anymore and it'll make the updates and upgrading process a lot easier. We talked about the security piece. Of course, probably the hottest thing that everyone's talking about is all about AI, and if you've got to be able to go through and run AI. And I think what a lot of people forget about the AI world is that for the last 15 or 20 years, we've tried to make hardware completely irrelevant. We went from bare metal systems to virtualization to cloud, to we have abstracted away that hardware. We no longer care about it. And then, all of a sudden AI shows up and now all of a sudden you care about the accelerators, you care about the GPUs, you want to make that... It's extremely expensive. You want to make it extremely efficient, and guess what takes care of all that? You're back at the operating system again. So, we spent a lot of time inside of RHEL, making sure that we can allow customers to optimize the efficiency of that underlying hardware. So, we work with the entire ecosystem, work with all the different partners, but we really understand that space really well of how you glue together the applications they care about, in this case, AI, the underlying hardware, how you bring all those things together. So, it sounds like really simple. You shouldn't even have to worry about it and that's really our goal. We want to make it so customers don't have to worry about that type of stuff.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, let's dig into that a little bit. What is your advice for teams about how they can take the greatest advantage of everything that RHEL has to offer, especially at the build stage, so that they are in fact devising better strategies from the very beginning?

Chris Wells

>> Yeah, and so that's another piece that we've put into it is that we've got a lot of focus on how can we get advice better to people to be able to build their systems? Because we know if you do a better job of when you initially deploy a system, if you make all the right decisions there in terms of how you're going to build and provision that system, it's going to be a lot better experience all the way... It's going to be easier to manage, it's going to be more cost-effective to manage all the way. So, one of the other announcements that we have as part of RHEL 10 is we've always had a service in there known as Red Hat Insights. We have now coupled the Lightspeed piece, which has the AI advice I talked about, the command line assistant. Well, now we can take that and couple that in with the Insights piece. So, we now can give people advice to say, "Hey, you want to build a system, you should use these packages." We've got a package recommendation that comes from Lightspeed that feeds into Insights to really give people that advice and that knowledge to better build their systems.

Rob Strechay

>> How does that also help organizations understand what's coming down the road and from a roadmap perspective and really help them plan out what they're going to do? Because like you said, Ashesh was on and we were talking about long-term support and things of that nature, which feel free to comment on as well, because I know that's really hard to do and I know it's one of those things that when somebody gets on a version, like you were talking about-

Chris Wells

>> They want to park and never leave.

Rob Strechay

>> Exactly. But feel free to comment on that as well. But I think that whole insights planning and the roadmap and where RHEL goes, how does that all help from that perspective?

Chris Wells

>> Well, of course, one of the things of being an open source company is we put our roadmaps out there. We show people what we're working on. But just because you tell people, that doesn't mean that it's there when they want to consume it. So, a lot of the time it's really like people are like, "I need to know the information now. I know it's available, but I need to know it now in this place." So, now again, with that Insights service that we include with every Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, there's an option in there now to see what's coming in the roadmap. And specific to that set of systems that they're managing, you can say like, "Hey, here's all the packages that you're running. Here's all the software applications that are running. Here's the version. How long is that version going to be supported? Is it going to be supported for another three months, six months, 12 months?" Whatever it happens to be. So, to your point, all of those customers can decide how they want to plan out their environments because a lot of this all really comes down to the planning, like, "Hey, I've got this application here. That's the moneymaker in the organization. It's got to run on this operating system on this hardware, I got to keep that whole stack all running. Give me all the information to know what that lifecycle is." So, if my vendor is saying up here, "I got to run that application for another year until the next version comes out," well, then how do I make sure that both the hardware and the operating system are going to support that? We're providing them with all that information and we also provide them with all that support, so if they want to have that extended lifecycle.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, a lot of customers are operating in really strict, highly-regulated environments. I'm thinking about telecoms, I'm thinking about financial services. How does Red Hat and RHEL specifically help those customers in those highly-regulated industries stay more secure?

Chris Wells

>> Well, a couple of different ways. I would say probably the biggest thing is that we spend a lot of time looking at all of the various types of compliance standards that are out there, the security standards, things like all the CVs to make sure their systems are patched and updated. We are constantly making sure that all those packages are available to them. But again, it's not good enough just to say like, "Here's the software." You got to get the software on the system and make it work. And so, that's where we have a lot of our management tooling. So, whether it be Insights, which again comes with every Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, which is a software-as-a-service option. Very easy graphical to use to manage those systems. That works for a lot of customers. But you get the customers in the highly-regulated or maybe the government space that say, "Nope, we are air-gapped. We do not have an internet connection. We cannot do that." Well, then we have other software that they can deploy, like Red Hat Satellite that can go through and configure and manage all those different systems on it. So, again, we got to get the software out to them that's properly patched and secured and they've got to have a way to deploy all that through the management tools.

Rob Strechay

>> Just building off of that, another optional program is Security Select. Why don't you help people understand where that plays a role and for what types of customers and why it's... I think it's really cool. I mean, personally, I look at it and I go... Especially for organizations where some of the hardest people to find are the security folk to have in there and knowing when to go and when not to go from version to version is hard enough.

Chris Wells

>> Yeah. Well, it's interesting you say very cool, because I'm going to guess that you must have been like a... You said you were a Unix admin or a Linux admin?

Rob Strechay

>> I was.

Chris Wells

>> Yeah, because you probably hated the security.

Rob Strechay

>> I had problems with them.

Chris Wells

>> Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> We didn't have lunch together very often.

Chris Wells

>> You get those two organizations, they kind of come together because you're sitting there as that Linux/Unix admin. You're trying to keep all your systems up to date. You're trying to keep it running. And then, all of a sudden the security team comes along with the vulnerability scanner and says, "Guess what? You got three packages on this system. They are not secure. Those must be patched. Those must be updated. You got to go take care of it." So, then what do you do? You call Red Hat, you say, "Hey, what's the story with these different packages where all they are?" And traditionally, where we've had a challenge I would say is we've gone through and worked with customers, like we're going through and patching all those, but a lot of them we do through back ports and we do them through back ports because we want to solve the security, but we don't want to change the functionality because they're running this application that is dependent on that particular package. And we want to make it secure, but not change any functionality to damage the dependency with that application. So, a lot of times the vulnerability scanners will go through and they'll say, "Hey, this package is not updated," even though we've back ported successfully to it. So, a new offer that you mentioned that we call Security Select, we introduced today here at Red Hat Summit that we now give the customer that if you're going through and running something, what we would call extended support, so it's past the normal 10-year life cycle on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, and you've got a series of packages that we've back-ported and we've secured, but they're still failing on your vulnerability scanner. Or maybe they're are set of packages that we have not patched because they're really low priority to us and the general public, really high priority to you, you can now purchase a Security Select option and essentially buy like a 10 pack and we'll go through and fix those 10 specific CVEs in your environment and provide them to you. So, now you, as the Linux admin, can deal with your security people and say, "Fixed."

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, done.

Chris Wells

>> Done.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, I hope the product marketing is making peace between the admins and the security.

Rob Strechay

>> I love it.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. All right. That's just-

Rob Strechay

>> Then we can go to lunch together.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exactly.

Chris Wells

>> That's what I do. I bring people together, you know?

Rebecca Knight

>> Way to go, Chris. All right. Well, a pleasure having you on, a really great conversation.

Chris Wells

>> Thank you so much. It was a joy to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit AnsibleFest. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.