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Balkrishna Pandey
Balkrishna Pandey

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Redhat Advanced Cluster Management (RHACM)-Manage your applications and clusters at scale

RHACM is a powerful tool for managing Kubernetes clusters across multiple private and public clouds. With RHACM, you can centrally create, update, and delete Kubernetes clusters, search and modify any Kubernetes resource across the entire domain, and quickly troubleshoot and resolve issues across your federated domain.

Red Hat Advanced Management Cluster Console

When creating or updating clusters, RHACM can automate tasks such as configuring cloud-defined storage, static IP addresses, updating network components (like firewalls or load balancers), and more with the integration of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. This makes it easy to manage your Kubernetes clusters from a single platform.

Redhat Advanced Cluster Management is an excellent option if you're looking for a way to streamline the management of your Kubernetes clusters and application life cycle management.

Some of the features of ACM include

Management of multiple clusters in one place

You can manage all your Kubernetes clusters—on-premises and in any cloud—from a single platform with complete visibility, control, and consistency. You can also stay up to date on the latest upstream open source releases without the burden of managing multiple Kubernetes versions.

  • You can use Kubernetes to create, update, and delete clusters across multiple private and public clouds.

  • ACM can automate tasks such as configuring cloud-defined storage, static IP addresses, updating network components (like firewalls or load balancers), and more.

  • With intelligent search and filtering, you can find any resource—cluster, node, pod, secret, service, or user—across your entire domain.

  • You can also use powerful filtering capabilities to identify and fix problems in your federated domain quickly.

  • policy-driven access control can ensure that only the right people have access to the right resources.

  • RHACM integrates with the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to provide a complete solution for automating the management of Kubernetes clusters.

  • Declarative cluster provisioning and updates with RHACM, you can provision Kubernetes clusters quickly and easily using declarative configuration files. You can also use the same declarative configuration files to update your clusters as your needs change. This makes it easy to manage your life-cycle of multiple Kubernetes clusters from a single platform.

Policy-based governance, risk, and compliance

Red Hat's Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is a policy-based governance solution that helps manage risk and ensure compliance across multiple clusters. The solution provides a central control point for cluster administration, making it easy to enforce policies and manage risk across multiple clusters. The policy engine ensures that all operations are compliant with organizational policies, and the built-in reporting and auditing capabilities provide visibility into compliance status. The solution also includes a web-based user interface that makes it easy to administer clusters from a single location.

  • You can centrally enforce policies for security, applications, and infrastructure with RHACM. This helps you to identify and fix policy violations across your federated domain quickly.

  • You can also get immediate visibility into your compliance posture based on your defined standards.

  • RHACM integrates with the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to provide a complete solution for automating the management of Kubernetes clusters. This includes the use of automation to fix policy violations and gathering information about clusters for analysis.

Advanced application life-cycle management

ACM is a tool that can help to streamline and optimize the application life-cycle management process. It provides a complete picture of the application life cycle, allowing developers to see where improvements can be made. In addition, it offers advanced features such as application performance monitoring and automatic scaling. This makes it easy to keep applications running smoothly, even as demand changes. As a result, RHACM can help to improve the quality of software products and reduce the time and cost of development. You can use ACM to,

  • Deploy and update applications quickly and easily based on governance policies and placement rules. This includes deploying or updating applications and automating configurations like networking, databases, and others.

  • Automatically deploy applications to specific clusters based on what channel and subscription the app is in.

  • Continuously reconcile cluster state with git state if there is any miss-match.

  • Gain visibility into the health of your applications and their dependencies. This helps you to identify and fix problems quickly.

Manage the complete life cycle of your applications from a single platform. This includes provisioning, updating, and scaling applications. ACM is an integrated solution that can help organizations to manage the complete application life cycle.

Multi-cluster Observability using Thanos, Grafana, AlertManager, and Prometheus

The integration of Thanos, Grafana, AlertManager, and Prometheus provides a complete solution for monitoring and observing multiple Kubernetes clusters. This solution gives you the ability to see all of your metrics in one place and to create alerts that span multiple clusters. As a result, you can more easily identify issues and correct them quickly. The integration of these tools also makes it easy to add new clusters to your monitoring environment. You can use this solution to,

  • Collect metrics from multiple Kubernetes clusters in one place: Thanos collects data from all of your Kubernetes clusters and keeps it in a central place. Thanos provides a global view of all of your metrics, making it easy to query data from multiple clusters. You can quickly group, filter, query this data, and do a deep scan of individual clusters to find the information you need.

  • Create Grafana dashboards that span multiple clusters: Grafana lets you create dashboards that show data from various Kubernetes clusters. The Dynamic Search and Visual Web Terminal features can be used to query data across all of your clusters. Multi-cluster health and optimization can be easily understood with the help of dashboards. These dashboards will show you how each cluster is doing. You can also keep track of long-term data using them.

  • Set up alerts that span multiple clusters: AlertManager can send alerts to various channels, such as email, PagerDuty, and Slack. You can also use webhooks to send alerts to custom channels. AlertManager can be used to create alerts that span multiple clusters. This way, you can be sure that you will receive an alert even if one of your clusters is down.

Multicluster Networking with Submariner

Submariner is a Kubernetes-native solution that enables direct networking between Pods and Services in different Kubernetes clusters, either on-premises or in the cloud. This allows Pods and Services to communicate with each other as if they were on the same network, without the need for complex network configurations or NAT. Submariner provides a simple and efficient way to connect Kubernetes clusters, making it an ideal solution for multi-cluster deployments. In addition, Submariner is designed to work with any Kubernetes cluster, making it a flexible solution for a variety of environments. Some of the features of ACM using Submariner includes,

  • Automatic cluster discovery and security: RHACM Provides cross-cluster network infrastructure with Submariner for direct and security-focused communication. Submariner automatically discovers Kubernetes clusters, making it easy to connect new clusters. It also uses TLS for communication between clusters, ensuring that all traffic is securely encrypted.

  • Out-of-band data path: Submariner uses an out-of-band data path for communication between clusters, eliminating the need for NAT. This ensures that all traffic is securely routed between clusters without any single point of failure.

  • Automatic route propagation: Submariner automatically propagates routes between clusters, making it easy to connect new services. RHACM uses DNS service discovery for Kubernetes clusters associated by Submariner in multi-cluster environments. This way, all of the clusters can communicate with each other.

  • Scalability: Submariner is designed to work with any number of Kubernetes clusters, making it a scalable solution for large deployments.

  • Observability: Submariner provides a comprehensive observability framework for multi-cluster deployments, making identifying and fixing problems easy. The Submariner Console shows the status of all clusters and services in deployment and provides detailed information about the health of each cluster. It also uniformly manages and observes microservices-based applications network flow for behavioral insight, control, and troubleshooting.

Conclusion

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is a comprehensive solution for managing Kubernetes clusters and the application life cycle. It provides a central control point for cluster administration, making it easy to enforce policies and manage risk across multiple clusters. The policy engine ensures that all operations are compliant with organizational policies, and the built-in RBAC controls provide granular access control to cluster resources. Advanced Cluster Management also offers a simple and efficient way to connect Kubernetes clusters, making it an ideal solution for multi-cluster deployments. In addition, ACM is designed to work with any Kubernetes cluster, making it a flexible solution for various environments.

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