Red Hat Bolsters Hybrid Cloud Automation With Latest Version of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes

By AIT News Desk On Jul 14, 2021

Tighter Integration With Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Fuses Modern Management Capabilities With Traditional and Hybrid It Environments

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.3, the latest version of the company’s enterprise-grade Kubernetes management offering. Designed to provide greater flexibility for managing and scaling hybrid and multicloud environments in a unified and automated way, IT teams can now accelerate the management, security features and automation of their hybrid clouds with the integration of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for a more modern, hybrid cloud-ready environment.

Driving automation across traditional and hybrid cloud environments

As cloud technologies are adopted alongside traditional infrastructure, many organizations look to integrate networking, storage and security systems to minimize the growing management complexity that’s inherent with separate tools, workflows and strategies for IT teams. The integration between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management is designed to accelerate the automation and cohesion between cloud-native clusters, virtual machines and traditional infrastructure with streamlined tooling and coordination.

When containerized environments need to connect with traditional IT environments, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management can automatically trigger Ansible Playbooks before or after key lifecycle actions such as application and cluster creation, making it easier to automate tasks like configuring networking, connecting applications to databases, constructing load balancers and firewalls, and updating IT service management (ITSM) ticketing systems. With a Resource Operator for Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, building on the Kubernetes Operator-based foundation of Red Hat OpenShift to encapsulate complex operational knowledge into code, Advanced Cluster Management can call on Ansible Automation Platform to execute tasks more efficiently outside of the Kubernetes cluster. The result is a single, automated workflow for customers to operationalize Red Hat OpenShift environments alongside traditional IT systems.

As Ansible Automation Platform has grown, having reached 7 million active Ansible nodes and expanding capabilities with Red Hat Insights for Ansible Automation Platform, so does the potential to expand automation’s power to more business areas. This helps organizations better prepare for the open hybrid cloud world, where public cloud services, private cloud infrastructure and traditional IT footprints unite to meet evolving business goals.

Flexible management of cloud-native and traditional infrastructure with less complexity

As the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, Red Hat OpenShift is a crucial component for building a more agile hybrid cloud. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management enables organizations to get the most out of these deployments by extending and scaling Red Hat OpenShift clusters, with the addition of next-generation management capabilities like provisioning on managed clusters, on-premises, bare metal or in public clouds, regardless of IT environment mix.

For organizations looking to reduce management complexity while still maintaining the benefits of enterprise Kubernetes, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.3 includes additional support for importing managed Kubernetes clusters for Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA), as well as OpenShift clusters on IBM Power Systems. This builds on supported managed Kubernetes clusters for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud (ROKS), Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO), Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated (OSD) and IBM system Z. It also supports provisioning on-premises Red Hat OpenShift clusters on Red Hat OpenStack directly from Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.

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Customers can also manage clusters more effectively by discovering and importing clusters from cloud.redhat.com, which helps manage more advanced features and alleviate the manual effort of importing clusters individually. With cluster hibernation, customers can also schedule clusters that are not in use to go into hibernation mode to preserve resources and better manage cloud costs.

With the integration of Red Hat Insights for Red Hat OpenShift, teams can also gain actionable intelligence on their cluster health for their Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management managed fleet and take proactive and remediation actions based on the analytics being provided from Red Hat OpenShift-based telemetry and Red Hat expertise.

Building on Red Hat’s commitment to open source innovation
Continuing more than two decades of support and collaboration in the open source world, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management is a fully open solution and builds on the latest innovations of open source projects, including Argo CD, Open Policy Agent and Submariner.

OpenShift GitOps extends the capabilities of Argo CD for integrated visibility, helping customers make informed decisions at scale. OpenShift GitOps works in tandem with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management policies to drive compliance and configuration at scale for tighter CI/CD alignment, adding the ability to troubleshoot applications in the topology view deployed by Argo CD.
Available in tech preview, integration with Submariner provides enhanced multi-cluster networking capabilities to reduce the complexity of deploying application components and networking requirements across clusters.
Broader production support for Open Policy Agent/gatekeeper, with 20-30 new OPA/gatekeeper policies designed to enhance compliance and configuration management for customers.

The support for this open source innovation enables IT operations teams to better maintain compliance and configuration within regulatory standards, furthered by greater policy enforcement to help prevent violations. IT teams can build tailored policy and management workflows that meet their own specific needs, all within the supported environment of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.

Availability

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.3 will be generally available in the coming weeks.

Dave Lindquist, general manager and vice president, Software Engineering, Advanced Kubernetes Management, Red Hat
“Cloud-native applications and services are not an island. We need to meet organizations where they are to bridge the divide between traditional IT infrastructure and cloud-native development, so that IT teams can focus on innovation rather than trying to get disparate technologies to work together. Red Hat is uniquely positioned to bring these capabilities together through a GitOps-based approach, helping to accelerate and scale modernization. Now, customers can automate the full stack from start to finish, from the cluster to the policy and governance to the application deployment, helping to eliminate silos and further organization-wide hybrid cloud strategies.”

Tim Grieser, research vice president, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC
“IT automation and configuration management tools are being seen by IT executives as a way to embed the competitive advantages of speed and quality; as such, investments continue to address traditional IT environments and modern application architectures. The reality is that both environments are critical to business success. The automation of technology processes and the orchestration of multiple processes are critical and increasingly required to enable scale for I&O teams as software delivery cycles increase.”