Red Hat brings greater simplicity and flexibility to Kubernetes management with latest version of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes

We’re pleased to announce the general availability of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.5, which is designed to help organizations streamline the management of cloud-native workloads and hybrid cloud. This latest release enables customers to extend their existing tools and skills to simplify operations, while providing greater visibility into how they can further optimize Kubernetes management.

Maintaining enterprise Kubernetes across complex and diverse environments 

While many organizations still rely on traditional datacenter infrastructure, they’re able to integrate Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management into their operations. With Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.5, customers can import, manage and create their existing OpenShift clusters on Red Hat Virtualization and Arm architecture, allowing for the creation of clusters across architectures from a single management hub. By expanding where these clusters can run, organizations can retain existing IT investments, while gaining broader management capabilities across heterogeneous environments, encompassing managed clusters, private clouds, bare-metal servers, or in public clouds. IT teams get additional support to import and manage OpenShift clusters on Arm architecture (Tech Preview) and Red Hat Virtualization (General Availability).

As clusters scale, so do the costs and time associated with managing these resources, as well as the redundancies that can spread across footprints. Also new in version 2.5 is a CLI-based Hosted Control Planes (Tech Preview) feature, enabling the reduction in control plane footprint by removing redundant control plane nodes and combining these control plane services in order to achieve the same functionality with increased cluster density and better overall efficiency. Teams can speed up the time it takes to provision new clusters, lower the costs of these footprints, and improve return on investment. 

Centralized usability and visibility to manage clusters at scale

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.5 builds on the latest innovations of the open source project Argo CD (OpenShift GitOps). Using PolicyGenerator, it can more easily be integrated with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management Governance to generate policies to drive compliance to enterprise and external standards and configuration management at scale. This includes the ability to create and deploy ApplicationSets from OpenShift GitOps across a hybrid cloud environment without having to leave the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management console.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.5 adds additional enhancements to make managing clusters at scale easier: 

• Business continuity at the management hub provides full backup and restore of the hub and managed cluster resources in an active-passive data recovery scenario.

• Teams can export Kubernetes cluster metrics from Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management into other monitoring tools for a more holistic view of distributed systems, making it easier to see problems arising quickly, and move to remediation. 

• PolicySets allow for easier organizing, managing and enforcing policies for clusters at scale. Customers can define their own PolicySets, organize them into logical groups and deploy across clusters to reduce the potential for human error at scale in policy deployment.

• Rich multicluster networking capabilities using the open source project Submariner for applications deployed across multiple clusters. Developer complexity is reduced via application services, which communicate using an encrypted VPN tunnel. 

Availability

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management 2.5 is now generally available. For additional details, check out our trial experience here.