Advanced Cluster Management for Your Hybrid Cloud

Enterprises are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud technology built on open source software. Look no further than the explosive rise of Kubernetes container orchestration platforms, in use today at many large organizations to manage new applications and services, and even keep fleets of virtual machines running at scale.

Many teams are turning to Kubernetes and its rich set of complex features to help them orchestrate and manage containers in production, development, and test environments. But running a hybrid cloud Kubernetes environment is far from simple.

Kubernetes runs your workload by placing containers into “pods” to run on “nodes.” Each node contains the services necessary to run pods. A node may be a virtual or physical machine and typically you’d have several nodes in a cluster, although in a learning or resource-limited environment, you might have just one. Each Kubernetes cluster includes the components that represent the control plane and a set of nodes.

It is easy and fast for enterprises to spin up Kubernetes clusters, whether in public or private clouds. A Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey of its community found that 74% are running Kubernetes in production.

In IDG’s 2020 Cloud Computing Survey, 81% of respondents have at least one application or part of their infrastructure running in the cloud and 55% indicated they are using more than one public cloud. That can lead to a fragmented landscape of Kubernetes clusters as different clouds provide different stacks, while development and application teams may be making their own cloud choices, often on a per-project basis.

Working with Kubernetes clusters across hybrid environments means organizations often face multiple management consoles, user interfaces, logins, and more. Each cluster has to be individually deployed, upgraded, and configured for security. In addition, if applications need to be deployed across environments, deployment has to be done manually or outside the Kubernetes environment control.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes enables organizations to manage their Kubernetes clusters with consistency across the hybrid cloud — from Red Hat OpenShift deployed on-premises, on bare metal, and on major public cloud providers to native clusters from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

That solution enables teams to:

• Centrally create, update, and delete Kubernetes clusters across multiple private and public clouds
• Search, find, and modify any Kubernetes resource across the entire domain
• Quickly troubleshoot and resolve issues across your federated domain

Cloud-native applications running in container environments have very different management requirements than virtual-based environments of the past. Applications are increasingly built as discrete functional parts, each of which can be delivered in a container. That means for every application, there are more parts to manage. Clusters commonly run more than 1,000 containers so managing them can become overwhelming. Red Hat can help.

To learn more, read this Red Hat article about Kubernetes cluster management.