Overview
A hosted control plane (HCP) is a cloud-native architecture where the management components of a Red Hat® OpenShift® cluster, specifically the control plane, are decoupled from the worker nodes and managed as a service. Red Hat OpenShift offers HCP through the HyperShift project.
HCP offers a consolidated, efficient, and secure approach to managing OpenShift and other Kubernetes clusters at scale. Instead of running on dedicated infrastructure (for the masters) within each cluster, the control plane components are hosted on a separate management cluster and managed as regular OpenShift workloads. This separation offers many advantages for organizations looking to optimize their OpenShift deployments especially for cost, strong isolation, and fast cluster provisioning time.
In this article, we will explore the concept of hosted control planes and discuss the benefits for OpenShift self-managed environments and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS with hosted control planes.
Benefits of hosted control planes
Hosted control planes for Red Hat OpenShift help pave the way for a true hybrid cloud approach and other benefits.
| Features | Benefits |
| Reduced costs: Smaller resource footprint and efficient resource utilization significantly reduce costs, especially at scale. | By leveraging Kubernetes' own orchestration capabilities, HCP eliminates the need for dedicated control plane nodes, allowing you to run more clusters with less infrastructure. |
| Fast provisioning: Streamlined provisioning processes and automated management tasks accelerate cluster deployment and application delivery. | Since control planes are managed as Kubernetes workloads, they can be spun up and scaled much faster than traditional VM-based control planes. |
| Strong isolation: Dedicated infrastructure and security controls for the control plane enhance isolation, minimize attack surfaces, and improve overall security posture. | HCP provides a clear separation between the management plane and tenant workloads, introducing decoupled personas for management and developers, reducing the impact of potential security breaches. |
| Simplified operations: Offloading control plane management to experts frees up your team to focus on core business objectives. | HCP simplifies cluster management tasks like upgrades and scaling through well defined APIs, allowing your developer teams to focus on delivering business value. Additionally, the operation of managing a fleet of clusters is more centralized, which helps reduce external factors that can affect the cluster status. Site reliability engineers (SREs) have a centralized place to debug issues and navigate to the data plane, which can lead to shorter Time to Resolution (TTR) and greater productivity. |
| Improved scalability & reliability: The decoupled architecture enables independent scaling of control plane and worker nodes, ensuring high availability and seamless scaling based on workload demands. | With HCP, you can scale your control plane and worker nodes independently to meet changing application demands without impacting the availability of other clusters. |
Hosted control planes for Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift leverages the power of HCPs in both on-premises and cloud deployments:
- Self-managed Red Hat OpenShift: Offers the flexibility to deploy HCPs on-premise or on the cloud for the following providers: Agent (bare metal), OpenShift Virtualization, and AWS allowing for greater control and customization. For more information, see the documentation.
- Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA): Provides a fully managed HCP experience on AWS, delivering a simplified and cost-effective way to run OpenShift. For more information, see the documentation.
Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) with hosted control planes
Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) with hosted control planes is a new deployment model for ROSA in which the control plane is hosted in a ROSA service AWS account, rather than the customer’s individual AWS account.
Hosting and managing the control plane in a ROSA service AWS account provides the most effective and efficient use of customer resources, resulting in significant cost savings, faster provisioning time, improved security posture and increased reliability for ROSA customers. Customer benefits include:
- Efficiency and cost optimization:
- Quickly spin up or tear down clusters: Faster cluster lifecycle management allows you to optimize resource utilization and reduce costs by only paying for what you use.
- Flexible annual billing: Easily adjust your cluster resources with annual billing options, providing the flexibility to switch between node types as needed.
- Smaller footprint: HCP reduces the overall infrastructure footprint compared to traditional ROSA deployments, leading to lower operational costs.
- Control, flexibility, and speed:
- Deploy clusters in minutes: Get started with new clusters in approximately 15 minutes, accelerating your development and deployment cycles.
- Upgrade your control plane and worker nodes independently: This provides greater flexibility and control over your cluster environments.
- Enhanced resilience and reliability:
- Highly available control plane: Deployed across multiple availability zones, the control plane provides resilience and minimizes the risk of downtime.
- Offloaded infrastructure management: Red Hat manages the underlying HCP infrastructure, freeing you from operational overhead and reducing the chance of errors.
The bottom line on hosted control planes
Hosted control planes provide better cost, faster provisioning time, and security optimizations for managing your workloads. As a result, they are well suited for many use cases, such as:
- Hosting clusters with specific characteristics.
- Workload tiering.
- Flexible upgrades (control planes can be upgraded independently of workers).
Next steps
Go beyond the basics of hosted control planes by learning how to create clusters using ROSA with our free ROSA with hosted control planes experience.
