Supercharge your Red Hat OpenShift local environment with Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed

Red Hat OpenShift Local is a development environment where Red Hat OpenShift applications run on a local machine, and it provides a sandbox environment for developers to build, test, and iterate on applications without requiring access to a full-scale cloud infrastructure. And it’s just been made better with the addition of Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed!

Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed is a generative AI virtual chat assistant that exists to improve productivity and accessibility for OpenShift users of all skill levels, from novices to experts. 

OpenShift Lightspeed on OpenShift Local

OpenShift Lightspeed is easy to access since it’s integrated directly into the OpenShift web console. Furthermore, it allows you to bring your own large language models (LLMs) through the following supported providers: Microsoft Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, or IBM watsonx. OpenShift Lightspeed also eases troubleshooting and investigating cluster resources. It offers step by step guidance that is highly interpretable because OpenShift Lightspeed supports its responses with OpenShift documentation. OpenShift Lightspeed is also highly specialized. For security, it has information filtering and lets the user know when a question is off-limits.

To demonstrate, I asked OpenShift Lightspeed 3 questions:

1. What is OpenShift?
2. What does Donald Trump think about OpenShift Lightspeed?
3. What is RHEL AI?

After explaining what OpenShift is, the generative AI chat assistant provided documentation that I could follow to better understand or explore new features. OpenShift Lightspeed was able to decipher that the second question was not an appropriate one to answer for its intended purpose. I asked the question a second time and it pointed me to compliance documentation. To the question on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) AI, OpenShift Lightspeed was able to steer me away from asking questions that are not OpenShift-related, despite the question being related to another Red Hat product. For these reasons, OpenShift Lightspeed impressed me with its specificity and interpretability.

Figures 1-3 show the responses to each of the questions posed.

Getting started

If you’d like to check out OpenShift Local on your local environment, here’s where you can get it today. To go a step further and reduce the learning curve in OpenShift, allow easy troubleshooting, get evidence-based step-by-step guidance and increase productivity for day-to-day operations, you can find OpenShift Lightspeed installation instructions here. As you follow these instructions, do remember to use two spaces (not a tab) to indent the YAML.

Using Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed

Once OpenShift Lightspeed is installed in your cluster, there are two primary ways to interact with it:

1. Click the OpenShift Lightspeed floating icon, which is located in the lower right corner of the screen (Figure 4).
2. Use the Actions dropdown on specific resources in the console, which allows the resource’s context to be injected into the dialogue (Figure 5).

Get OpenShift Lightspeed on OpenShift Local today

As a novice user interacting with OpenShift Local for the first time, OpenShift Lightspeed helped me to navigate the platform more efficiently. When I first tried to install it, I ran into a typo in my OLSConfig custom resource (CR) YAML. This YAML tells the operator how to deploy the OpenShift Lightspeed Service. Initially, I struggled to figure out where to find the YAML, and it took me about 4 minutes to figure out the answer. After installing OpenShift LightSpeed, I decided to ask OpenShift Lightspeed where I could find the OLSConfig CR YAML. Within 30 seconds, it provided me the answer. Hence, I believe it will be helpful with troubleshooting, navigating the interface, and investigating cluster resources for all OpenShift users. For that reason and more, try OpenShift Local today to help you navigate and troubleshoot your OpenShift cluster.