Open Sourcing Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes

Recently, at Red Hat Summit Virtual Event, we announced Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, a new management solution designed to help organizations further extend and scale Red Hat OpenShift, the leading enterprise Kubernetes platform.

This new product is based on technology that originated with IBM, and that technology was not fully open source. In accordance with Red Hat policy, we are in the process of opening the source code for this new product. This same open source technology will then also be used by IBM for its CloudPak for Multicloud Management. At Red Hat, we believe using an open development model helps create more secure, stable and innovative technologies. And the commitment to that open source model is what we have based our business model on. Even after joining forces with IBM, this commitment remains unchanged. We have worked more than 25 years to invest in open projects and technologies.

When open sourcing a previously closed codebase, there are technical and legal considerations that must be addressed, and addressing those issues can take time. Open sourcing a technology alone does not make a community. There are many aspects that need to be considered to ensure an environment that both enables and supports contributors, and it’s critically important that when we open source code, we do so with the confidence that the resulting project can support potential contributors. That vetting process is well underway with ACM, and we want to provide an update on our progress to date.

As with other Red Hat products, we separate the upstream projects from the downstream products. The upstream projects are where we focus on shared innovation with developers, and the downstream products are where we focus on integration and stability for customers. The upstream projects for ACM are collectively called the Open Cluster Management project, or OCM. Source code for the various OCM projects will live on GitHub.

Our intention is to open the codebase for Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes in chunks. Components will be released as separate projects, with priority given to those projects that we judge to be most suitable for community contribution. Currently there are 20 repositories available. Among the most interesting are the Application Lifecycle projects:

• https://github.com/open-cluster-management/multicloud-operators-subscription
• https://github.com/open-cluster-management/multicloud-operators-placementrule
• https://github.com/open-cluster-management/multicloud-operators-subscription-release
• https://github.com/open-cluster-management/multicloud-operators-channel
• Demonstrations: https://github.com/open-cluster-management/demo-subscription-gitops

We plan to provide periodic updates as we progress towards our goal of making ACM a fully open source project. For more information, please feel free to reach out to acm-contact@redhat.com