What's new with Ansible Lightspeed with watsonx Code Assistant

Since the initial release of Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant last year, IBM and our product and engineering teams have been busy with refinements and feature enhancements designed to make the service's code recommendations more relevant as well as ease the overall user experience. Let's take a look at this latest round of improvements:

Model customization / tuning

This new enhancement to IBM watsonx Code Assistant allows Ansible Lightspeed users to leverage their existing Ansible content to train the model. With this feature, you can improve the quality and accuracy of your Ansible content with code recommendations that are more tailored to your organization's specific needs and automation patterns. Learn more.

New IBM watsonx Code Assistant subscription options

IBM has replaced last year's "per seat" pricing with three new flexible IBM Cloud subscription options for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform customers and trial users to gain access to IBM watsonx Code Assistant: 

• Lite:  You can test drive the service with a free 30-day trial access that provides approximately 200 task prompts. You'll find the link to the trial offer at the top of the product page on IBM's website. If you're not already an Ansible Automation Platform customer, you can sign up for a 60-day trial here.
• Essentials: This pay-as-you-go plan allows small teams to experiment with the basic generative AI capabilities of the service (excluding  model customization). A credit card is required and no discounts are available with this plan.
• Standard: Intended to support enterprise-wide use of the service across development teams, this full-feature option includes model tuning. It requires a minimum monthly spend that includes approximately 13,000 task prompts. We recommend working directly with your IBM client representative to enable your platform engineers and developers with this option.

Ansible Lightspeed seat assignment deprecation

As a result of the above changes to the watsonx Code Assistant subscription plans, seat assignments for the Ansible Lightspeed service are no longer required within the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. However, there is still a limit of 10 Ansible Lightspeed users per 100 Ansible managed nodes.

Administrative dashboard. This new feature allows Red Hat account administrators to see telemetry data around the Ansible Lightspeed service. You can monitor metrics related to generative AI requests as well as receive insights into how end-users are using the service.

Technical preview end of life: Finally, with the availability of new trial and consumption based pricing, the Ansible Lightspeed technical preview is now retired as of March 11, 2024. This date reflects a grace period beyond our original terms and conditions which stated access up until December 31, 2023.

Ansible code bot (GA). 

The Ansible code bot scans existing content collections, roles, and playbooks through your designated Git repositories, then proactively creates pull requests whenever best practices or quality improvement recommendations are available. You can scan your Git repository manually or schedule scans at regular intervals. Ansible code bot is also ideal for updating your code when migrating from Ansible Tower or older versions of Ansible Automation Platform. For more information about Ansible code bot, read the documentation.

NOTE:  Ansible code bot is included with Ansible Automation Platform but does not require the Ansible Lightspeed service or IBM Cloud/watsonx Code Assistant subscription.

We'll dig deeper into some of these improvements in future blog posts. For now, you can get started with Ansible Lightspeed by exploring these additional resources:

• Try an Ansible Automation Platform 60-day trial
• Sign up for 30-day access to watsonx Code Assistant
• Read the blog: Getting started with Ansible Lightspeed with watsonx Code Assistant
• Visit us online: Ansible Lightspeed with watsonx Code Assistant