Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.6 Adds Enhancements to Observability, Ansible Support, and GitOps

We’re pleased to announce the general availability of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.6. Managing disparate workloads can require holistic oversight and governance to help enterprises better manage an ever-growing container fleet at the edge. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.6, as part of Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, adds new features aimed at improving management in high latency, low bandwidth use cases. 

Scaling enterprise Kubernetes across diverse and far-edge environments 

There are significant performance and scale improvements to Central Infrastructure Management within Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management and a single Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hub cluster can now deploy and manage up to 2,500 single-node OpenShift (SNO) clusters. Features like controlling the boot order via iPXE, which improves the user experience by avoiding boot order issues requiring manual intervention, and adding Day 2 workers to a SNO are now supported with OpenShift Container Platform 4.11 and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.6. SNO clusters can be deployed and managed at the edge through zero-touch provisioning, which now also supports BIOS configuration (Technology Preview - TP). Additionally, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.6 provides edge metrics-collectors and configurable data collector support for search (Developer Preview - DP) designed specifically for single-node and small workloads, allowing for greater observability, scalability, and security of remote operations. 

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management also offers new integrations with key tools, providing users with the flexibility to continue using existing workflows. Key integrations include:

• Automatic fleet-wide visibility of applications, including better visibility on the application topology, displaying applications created directly with OpenShift, OperatorHub, or even other tools like Flux.
• Cluster management directly from Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (TP), enabling Ansible users to interact with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management natively from the Ansible Automation Platform interface.
• Integration of PolicyGenerator and OpenShift GitOps, allowing users to dynamically create Policies based on their input resources stored in git. 
• Added support for Azure Red Hat OpenShift and open virtual network (OVN) in multicluster networking Submariner deployments.

As of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.5, ApplicationSets are generally available (GA) and are ready for use in production. Starting with OpenShift GitOps 1.6, ApplicationSets are also GA with the OpenShift GitOps operator - check out this blog for more information.

Keeping pace with the evolving Kubernetes policy landscape

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management governance framework is continuously improving to keep up with the evolutions of the open source world of Kubernetes policy. 

There are two major enhancements from a governance perspective. Customers can now include and exclude namespace by name, wildcards, label, and regular expressions, as well as delete resources when deleting policies. For example, a customer has created a Policy to generate NetworkPolicies. To retarget this Policy to other Managed Clusters, customers now have the option to get those NetworkPolicies removed from the Cluster where the Policy will be deleted. 

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management continues to improve integrations with Gatekeeper and Kyverno policy engines. With the 2.6 release, GateKeeper and Kyverno PolicySets are introduced, so customers can manage and group these community policies in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management with ease. 

Availability

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.6  is now generally available. If you’re looking for methods of connecting and controlling disparate Kubernetes clusters around your datacenter, at the edge, and around the globe, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.6 provides the capabilities that you need. As integrations spread across Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus and across our industry partners, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management continues to be the best tool for managing everything from high above the clouds. For additional details, refer to the release notes, and use our trial experience here.