Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant Release Notes

Enhancement

Deprecated feature

Known issue

Ability to generate roles and view role explanations

Role generation and viewing role explanations are now supported on the Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed cloud service. You can create roles within Ansible collections from the Ansible VS Code extension using a natural language interface in English. You can also view the explanations for new or existing roles. For more information, see Creating roles and viewing role explanations.

Availability of REST API on on-premise deployments

Platform administrators can now configure and use the Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed REST API to build a custom automation development and tooling workflow outside of VS Code. For more information, see Using the Ansible Lightspeed REST API and Ansible AI Connect. 1.0.0 (v1) in the API catalog.

Removal of unnecessary settings from the initial configuration of Ansible VS Code extension

The initial configuration of the Ansible VS Code extension now has fewer settings that are enabled by default. For more information, see Configuring the Ansible VS Code extension.

Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed on-premise deployment

Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed is now available for on-premise deployments. This capability provides the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform customers more control over their data and supports compliance with enterprise security policies. For example, organizations in sensitive industries with data privacy or air-gapped requirements can use on-premise deployments of both Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed and IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed on Cloud Pak for Data. Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed on-premise deployments are supported on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform version 2.4. For more information, see Setting up Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed on-premise deployment.

Playbook generation and explanations

Using the Ansible VS Code extension, you can create Ansible playbooks using a natural language interface in English. Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant reads the natural language prompts and generates an entire playbook recommendation based on your intent. You can also view the explanations for new or existing playbooks. The playbook explanations describe what the playbook or task within the playbook does and contextualize its impact. For more information, see Creating playbooks and viewing playbook explanations.

Ansible code bot General Availability

Previously, Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed provided the Ansible code bot as a Technology Preview release. Now, the Ansible code bot is available as General Availability release along with an improved performance and an Ansible code bot dashboard.

The dashboard displays a list of your repositories where the code bot is installed, the status of your repository scans, and indicates whether the scan schedule is not set, or is set to manual or scheduled scan. From the dashboard, you can start a manual scan, view the scan history, and view the repository. For more information, see Installing and configuring the Ansible code bot.

Ability to collect and manage the Admin dashboard telemetry

Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed now collects Admin dashboard telemetry data that provides insight into how your organization users are using the Ansible Lightspeed service, and displays the metrics on the Admin dashboard. If you no longer want to collect and manage the Admin dashboard telemetry, you can disable it for your organization. For more information, see Viewing and managing Admin dashboard telemetry.

Model customization

Organization administrators can now create and use fine-tuned, custom models that are trained on your organization’s existing Ansible content. With this capability, you can tune the models to your organization’s automation patterns and improve the code recommendation experience.

You can configure multiple custom models for your organization. For example, you can create a custom model for your corporate IT automation team and a different one for your engineering team’s infrastructure. You can also configure a custom model to make it available for all Ansible users or select Ansible users in your organization. For more information, see Configuring custom models.

Streamlined the setup process

Previously, organization administrators had to assign seat licenses to users so that they could access Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed. With the new subscription plans from IBM watsonx Code Assistant, organization administrators no longer need to manage access to Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed by assigning or removing seat licenses.

Ansible-specific IBM watsonx Code Assistant models

Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant uses Ansible-specific IBM watsonx Granite models unique to your organization, which are provided, managed, and maintained by IBM.

Single tasks and multitask generation

Using natural language prompts, you can generate single task or multiple task recommendations for Ansible task files and playbooks.

Content source matching

For each generated code recommendation, Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed lists content source matches, including details such as potential source, content author, and relevant licenses. You can use this data to gain insight into potential training data sources used to generate the code recommendations.

Post-processing capabilities

Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed offers post-processing capabilities that augment IBM watsonx Code Assistant and improve the quality and accuracy of code recommendations.

Content modernization

The Ansible code bot scans existing content collections, roles, and playbooks through Git repositories, and proactively creates pull requests whenever best practices or quality improvement recommendations are available. The bot automatically submits pull requests to the repository, which proactively alerts the repository owner to a recommended change to their content. Ansible code bot is available as a Technology Preview.