What’s New in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.4 - Edge and Beyond

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes allows you to centrally manage and secure your Kubernetes clusters at scale. In the 2.3 release, one of the most interesting capabilities we added was the integration with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform across all lifecycle areas. In this release, we are enhancing the value that Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management brings to you with key capabilities such as management at the edge scale, business continuity and more integrations.

More flexibility and freedom to manage OpenShift everywhere

When operating in hybrid and multicloud environments, it is helpful to have the ease to centrally manage your Kubernetes clusters, be it: OpenShift clusters on premises, bare metal, in public clouds, or your xKS clusters centrally. You should have  the choice to provision your OpenShift clusters wherever you want to. With this in mind, we have made the following enhancements to Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management:

• Cluster lifecycle support for Microsoft Azure Government (MAG): In the previous releases, we added the capability to provision OpenShift clusters on AWS, Azure, bare metal, GCP, , Red Hat OpenStack, and VMWare vSphere . You now have more choice with the provisioning and lifecycle management of OpenShift clusters to Microsoft Azure Government (MAG)
• Extending Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hub support: In this release, you get more flexibility to run the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hub on the infrastructure of your choice with the capability to run the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hub on OpenShift on IBM Power and IBM Z.
• Ease of provisioning OpenShift clusters on bare metal deployments (Tech preview): Using an easy self-service model, infrastructure owners can provide developers access to bare metal infrastructure resources to provision OpenShift clusters quickly. They can leverage features like Static IP Addressing and Live Discovery ISO to assist with the definition of bare metal hosts.

Above: Microsoft Azure Government cloud and bare metal infrastructure resources to provision OpenShift in the cloud or on premises.

Enhanced integrations across our product portfolio and beyond

We are continuously evolving the product experience by developing integrations across our portfolio, including with Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus and beyond to drive solutions for your business challenges. Here are some enhancements we are announcing:

• Easily deploy Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Central and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Sensors across clusters at scale: Earlier this year with Red Hat’s acquisition of Stackrox, we launched Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security with the goal of protecting your vital applications across build, deploy, and runtime.  When leveraging this integration with your Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management- clusters, instead of deploying the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Central server and Sensors at an individual cluster level manually, you can now easily create a single Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management policy and enforce it across clusters at scale. You can also easily access the ACS URL through the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management console for an in-depth look at your security metrics.
• Support for OpenShift GitOps (ArgoCD) ApplicationSets:  In the last release, we launched the OpenShift GitOps (Argo CD) integration with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management application lifecycle management by giving you a consolidated view of all applications in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, including the ones deployed by OpenShift GitOps. We continue to enhance the Openshift GitOps experience by allowing you to define the ArgoCD ApplicationSet directly from the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management UI. This allows centralized deployment for ApplicationSets across the fleet without having to leave your management interface.
• Drive notifications into preferred incident management tools: In the previous releases, you could send in cluster health metric alerts to your preferred incident management applications, such as Slack and Pagerduty. We are now enhancing  this capability by getting centralized alerts of all your policy violations across clusters to the hub and driving notifications to preferred incident management applications. You can quickly start troubleshooting by using these tools as an entrypoint to your Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management dashboards.
• Observability of non-OpenShift clusters: In addition to addressing your OpenShift cluster health metrics, we now bring in the cluster health from EKS, GKE, AKS, and IKS into the central Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hub, giving you an overview of cluster health across your OpenShift cluster fleet and beyond.
• Service Level Objectives (SLO) defined on the Grafana dashboard (Tech Preview): The integration with Grafana provides you with visualization into your cluster health metrics, but adding well-defined objectives (SLOs) helps you measure how these cluster metrics are performing as compared to the SLOs, thereby giving an accurate performance posture.

Above: OpenShift GitOps Application Set

Above: Observability of non-OpenShift clusters

Management at the edge

Edge use cases are all about performance and the ease of deploying smaller footprint clusters at scale. With single node OpenShift and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, you can seamlessly scale while enabling availability in high latency, low bandwidth edge use cases. Here are some of the key features that we are announcing:

• Edge management at scale: The number of single node OpenShift clusters managed by a single Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hub is approaching 2,000. Additionally, the IPv6 dual stack support simplifies the management of a scaled-out edge architecture. With these features, you can enable scalability in low bandwidth, high latency connections and disconnected sites.
• Zero Touch Provisioning (Tech Preview):  Mainly in the edge use cases especially in the Telco industry, the ease of provisioning clusters and getting networking workloads up and running easily is critical to success. Using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management with an assisted installer on premises, you can centrally initiate a provisioning process instead of the manual provisioning process.
• Single node OpenShift management (SNO): Get full management capabilities for your Single node OpenShift clusters essential for your edge use cases.
• Hub-side Policy Templating: Reduce the number of policies for high scale management scenarios by allowing policies to reference data from resources on the hub. Instead of, for instance, 1,000 policies, the framework reads a single policy on the hub and substitutes the variable as the policy deploys on the clusters.

Business continuity

Business continuity is an important aspect for every customer across industries to ensure that their business critical apps and stateful applications are always up and running. Here are some of the key features we are announcing:

• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hub backup and restore: Using a backup solution based on OpenShift API for Data Protection (OADP), managed cluster configurations can be backed up and restored onto a different hub cluster.
• Leverage RHODF (aka OCS) and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for disaster recovery across stateful workloads (Tech Preview): For your business critical stateful apps, RHODF along with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management will help you have a robust multisite, multicluster disaster recovery strategy. Both RHODF and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management enable fast and consistent Application DR that protects both application data and application state. While RHODF establishes that your application data volumes (PVs) are consistently and frequently replicated, resulting in reduced data loss recovery. DR operators that are enabled with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management automate the DR fail-over and fail-back processes to help make sure that your recovery is fast and error free from manual operations.
• Persistent Volumes replication using VolSync (Scribe) (Tech Preview):  Enable resilience for business critical stateful apps by ensuring a planned application migration strategy across your clusters. You can also use VolSync to create your own DR solution when working with non-RHODF(aka OCS) storage or heterogeneous storage products.

Above: Single Node OpenShift provisioning in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• Get started with RHACM 2.4 : https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_advanced_cluster_management_for_kubernetes/2.4/html-single/install/index#installing
• To learn more about Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, visit: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/advanced-cluster-management
• To try Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, visit: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/advanced-cluster-management/try-it
• To request a demonstration of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, visit: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/advanced-cluster-management#contact-form