Red Hat broadens the scope for cloud-native, Kubernetes management with greater observability and automation

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is designed to help organizations further extend and scale Red Hat OpenShift with enterprise-grade management capabilities across hybrid and multicloud environments. It enables IT teams to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters and automate multi-cluster application deployments across hybrid clouds while driving policy compliance and expanded governance. Today marks the general availability of Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.1, which extends management capabilities into established environments and helps to more proactively cultivate cluster performance for optimized cloud-native management.

Extend your traditional infrastructure with an advanced container management platform

Launched in August 2020, Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes meets customers where they are on their cloud-native journey, bridging the gap between existing infrastructure by expanding where Red Hat OpenShift and Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes can run. Users can provision Red Hat OpenShift on VMware vSphere or bare metal for on-premises clusters, so organizations can use existing environments to gain next-generation management capabilities. It also expands the ability for teams to add hybrid cloud workloads into existing operations, all while maintaining proper cluster lifecycle management for a cloud-native future.

Unified visibility of hybrid cloud container environment performance and health

Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes brings a centralized, single point of control to manage Kubernetes clusters—from Red Hat OpenShift deployed on premise and in public clouds, to managing OpenShift clusters from public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Building on the ability to take inventory, users have another important level of visibility to the multicluster world: By integrating open source projects Thanos and Grafana, users get a centralized view for cluster health and performance, making it easier to maintain optimal metrics for cluster operations. Customers can analyze long term, historical metrics to get an overview of multicluster health and optimization, providing better and more informed pattern detection of alerts and status per cluster. This helps to further eliminate barriers to cloud-native management across hybrid clouds and enables IT organizations to make sure applications are operating at their best, across the enterprise.

Simplify the application provisioning process and enforce policies consistently

With a sea of cloud-native development technologies now available, it can be faster and easier than ever before to create and deploy applications from development toolchains with GitOps. With this reduced complexity, developers need enhanced guidance to define application components while removing manual processes that were typically prone to human error.

As organizations deploy clusters across multiple clouds and management complexity increases, verifying the compliance of software components can be a challenge. Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes has the ability to set policies centrally for the automatic configuration of managed components across hybrid clouds, and to distribute and enforce up-to-date certificates.

The built-in, policy-driven automation and application lifecycle management for OpenShift deployments enables IT operations teams to better maintain compliance with industry or regulatory standards, furthered by greater policy enforcement to help prevent violations. Additionally, with support for open source projects Open Policy Agent and Gatekeeper, Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes helps protect organizations against ill-intentioned or accidental configuration drift. Check out the open policy repository for contributions from the community, partners, customers and Red Hat.

In addition to these updates, Red Hat is tech previewing an integration between Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, bridging the divide between traditional IT environments and cloud native, container-based solutions. This integration unites two of Red Hat's industry-leading platforms, Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform, to drive automation across the open hybrid cloud. You can read further about how this integration can help drive application modernization for IT environments.

To learn more, check out why cluster management is critical to edge computing and how Red Hat OpenShift delivers enterprise Kubernetes for any application, team or organization.