Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes

Sort, filter, and scan individual clusters and user workloads in addition to aggregated multiclusters with Grafana. Use the open source Thanos project for scalable metrics collection with long-term data retention. Get health metrics for OpenShift clusters and non-OpenShift clusters—such as EKS, GKE, AKS, and IKS—in the many out-of-the-box Grafana dashboards.

Customize Grafana dashboards based on metrics you define and predefined metrics. Define service-level objectives (SLOs) on a cluster or the platform services, measure the performance against them, and dynamically adjust for deeper collection during critical events when root cause analysis requires it.

Use the graphical console or the application programming interface (API) to identify, isolate, and resolve issues affecting distributed workloads. Application SREs can view application resource YAML and fetch logs from deployments in real time, assisting in mean time to resolution and problem determination. Improved controls with configurable data collection provides opportunities for high-scale environments and security lockdown to limit what gets collected from the managed clusters.

Gain intelligence on cluster health for your entire managed fleet and take proactive steps and remediation actions as needed, based on the analytics provided by Red Hat OpenShift-based telemetry and Red Hat expertise.

Respond and troubleshoot more easily by getting centralized alerts of cluster health metrics and all of your policy violations sent into your third-party tools, such as Slack and PagerDuty.

Global Hub 

The Global Hub architecture provides a centralized policy compliance view across multiple hubs, ensuring that organizations with high scale and/or strict divisions across regional datacenters can still get a holistic view of their entire security compliance posture from one central interface.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management supports the creation of OpenShift clusters on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure Government, AWS GovCloud, bare metal, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Virtualization, and VMware vSphere. 

Take advantage of features, such as worker pool scaling with autoscale configuration, cluster Hibernate® (tech preview), and resume via cluster pools (tech preview) to help deploy clusters in less time. Group clusters into cluster sets to more clearly define access controls.

As part of the integration, supercharge your playbooks with straightforward, security-focused, and Ansible-native access across your Kubernetes fleet, powered by the robust multicluster management layer provided by the multicluster engine for Kubernetes operator and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, with the stolostron.core Ansible Collection. Invoke Ansible within Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for cluster life cycle management, using pre- and post-hooks. 

Get rich multicluster networking capabilities with Submariner for application components deployed across multiple clusters. Reduce the complexity of deploying application components and networking requirements across clusters. 

Hosted control planes

Host and provision containerized Red Hat OpenShift control planes at scale, which solves for cost, footprint, time to provision, and portability across cloud environments with strong separation of concerns between management and workloads. This feature is generally available for bare metal and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and is available as a technology preview for AWS.

Central infrastructure management (CIM) for bare-metal deployments

Use a self-service model that allows infrastructure owners to provide developers access to bare-metal infrastructure resources to provision OpenShift clusters. Use the infrastructure environments allowing operators to readily maintain your bare-metal host inventory.

Use prebuilt policy templates to enforce policy on Kubernetes configuration (e.g., etcd encryption), identity and access management (IAM), certificate management, and deploy and configure operators, such as Compliance Operator, Gatekeeper/Open Policy Agent (OPA), and Container Security Operator across your clusters. Implement policy-based governance via GitOps to meet internal and external standards, using the open source policy collection repository.

Use the governance and risk dashboard to view and manage security risks and policy violations in all of your clusters and applications. Get details on violation history. Drill down into violation details by centrally accessing details from managed clusters from the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hub.

Customize policies for various compliance standards, governance dashboard views, and views for most-affected controls for specific standards.

Get a fully supported Gatekeeper and OPA operator that supports deployment of the Gatekeeper operator to your fleet, using compliance policy. Initiate Gatekeeper controls across your fleet to enforce various OPA policies. Centrally view and drill down into violations for all of your Gatekeeper and OPA policies.

Group policies for specific purposes (e.g., Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus deployment, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hardening, managed cluster hardening, grouping Gatekeeper policies, PCIStoreFront, HIPAA backend, etc.). This ensures an enhanced user-friendly experience of organizing, managing, and enforcing policies or policy sets for clusters at scale. Preconfigured Policy Sets are available via GitOps as a starting point to use this feature.

Integration with Kyverno Policy Sets

Get enhanced admission control capabilities and mutating capabilities with Kyverno Policy Sets. Generate and validate Kubernetes resources with the Kyverno integration, using the integration provided by Policy Generator (Kyverno is supported by the community). 

Integration with Compliance Operator

Deploy Compliance Operator at scale across your fleet, using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management to enforce various security profiles for compliance standards, such as the E8 Essential scan. Centrally view and drill down into violations for all of these security profiles.

Use Ansible Automation Platform integration with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management to automate remediation of noncompliant conditions and gather audit information about the clusters for analysis to promote proactive measures against policy violations detected by Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.

Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus Policy Set

Get a consolidated experience by using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management console to deploy OpenShift Platform Plus components consistently across hub and managed clusters by creating policy sets developed with the Policy Generator.

Allow policies to be auto-generated and deployed via OpenShift GitOps from existing Kubernetes configuration, Gatekeeper, and Kyverno policies.

Stronger security and edge scalability using templatized policies 

Secure delivery and enforcement of content from the hub to managed clusters, using templatized policies and its underlying encryption (from secret and protect functions).

Get wider visibility of the application topology and readily view the health of service endpoints and pods with all of the connected dependencies like image versions, associated placement rules, Kubernetes resources, and ConfigMaps, no matter if your application was created within Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, Red Hat OpenShift, or GitOps tools like ArgoCD and Flux. 

Automatically deploy applications to specific clusters by subscribing to different workload (resource) channels, such as GitHub, Helm repository, and ObjectStore types. 

Rapidly deploy workloads across your fleet, or only to specific clusters, on the basis of placement rule definitions and time windows to control when and where your applications are being deployed.

Automate everything outside of Kubernetes with your application deployments through pre- and post-hook Ansible job templates and workflows. For example, automate and configure networking, databases, load balancers, and firewalls with Ansible Automation Platform integration.

Create intuitive applications, using a form-based input with contextual help to guide you in defining your application components without dealing directly with YAML.

Use Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management to allow OpenShift GitOps/Argo CD to automatically deliver content as clusters come online or get imported. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management policies work in tandem with Argo CD to make sure compliance and configuration are managed and maintained at scale for tighter CI/CD alignment. View and troubleshoot applications deployed by Argo CD in the Advanced Cluster Management application topology view. Create application set objects for your clusters that are registered within Argo, directly from Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management console.

Use Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management with assisted installer on-premise and Topology Aware Lifecycle Manager (TALM) for high-scale cluster deployment, serving telecommunications and edge scenarios.

Get full management capabilities for your single-node OpenShift clusters—an essential feature for your edge use cases.

Reduce the number of policies for high-scale management scenarios by allowing them to refer to data from resources on the hub. TALM operator uses Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management policies to perform changes on the target clusters.

Back up your hub configuration and restore it in a different hub cluster, using a backup solution based on OpenShift API for Data Protection (OADP). This ensures the management configuration is not lost and the continuity of business is maintained while applications continue to operate across the fleet.

Provide a robust multisite, multicluster DR strategy for your stateful applications, using OpenShift Data Foundation and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management. OpenShift Data Foundation ensures your application data volumes and persistent volumes (PVs) are consistently and frequently replicated. DR operators that are set up with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management can automate the DR failover and failback processes asynchronously with Regional-DR for minimal recovery point objective (RPO) or synchronously with Metro-DR to achieve zero RPO. 

Ensure resilience for the stateful applications your business relies on by providing a planned application migration strategy across your clusters. You can also use VolSync to create your own DR solution when working with alternative vendors’ storage or heterogeneous storage products.