Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, the latest addition to Red Hat’s portfolio of IT management technologies designed for the hybrid cloud. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is designed to help organizations further extend and scale Red Hat OpenShift with enterprise-grade management capabilities across hybrid and multicloud environments, allowing them to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters and enable multi-cluster application deployments across hybrid clouds while ensuring policy and governance.

Modern management for modern environments

Application modernization is among today’s top IT priorities, with Red Hat OpenShift providing a powerful, scalable platform for this transformation built on Kubernetes, the de facto standard for modern application infrastructure. But similar to how physical management tools and processes did not work for virtualized environments, tools designed for managing virtual machines are not suited for today’s cloud-native, containerized world. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes addresses this need, further expanding what organizations can do with Red Hat OpenShift with the addition of next-generation management capabilities tailored for a cloud-native reality.

Red Hat designed Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to provide organizations with tools to support containerized application deployments across multiple clusters, whether an organization is just beginning to explore cloud-native computing or if they are running next-generation workloads in production. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes meets organizations where they are on their containerization journey, helping with the immediate concerns of managing multiple clusters while providing future-ready capabilities such as policy enforcement and governance controls.

Kubernetes across hybrid clouds, unified on a single control plane

Managing clusters across corporate datacenters and public cloud deployments frequently requires fragmented sets of tools tailored only for specific environments. Multiple management consoles, user interfaces, logins and more can create manual processes that are prone to human error, which in turn can lead to unnecessary downtime or put systems at risk of security or regulatory failures.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes helps to eliminate these barriers to cloud-native management across hybrid clouds by providing a single view to manage your Kubernetes clusters—from Red Hat OpenShift deployed on premise and in public clouds, as well as clusters from public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM and Microsoft Azure. From the datacenter to the edge and beyond, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes enables organizations to scale cloud-native applications from development to production across hybrid clouds, all managed from a single point of control.

More consistent policy-based governance, risk and compliance

More than 2,000 customers around the globe and across industries already turn to Red Hat OpenShift to power their business applications. Red Hat OpenShift pairs the innovation of Kubernetes with Red Hat’s commitment to delivering hardened, enterprise-ready open source solutions. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes builds on this commitment by delivering built-in policy driven automation for security, governance and multi-cluster and application lifecycle management for OpenShift deployments.

As organizations deploy clusters across multiple clouds and management complexity increases, security controls can become inconsistent across environments and verifying the compliance of software components adds to this challenge. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes brings the capability to centrally set policies for the automatic configuration of managed components across hybrid clouds, enabling IT operations teams to better maintain compliance with industry or regulatory standards. These policies can be enforced at scale with each new cluster, enabling rapid growth without greatly impacting an organization’s IT security footprint.

Availability

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is now generally available.

Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, Management, Red Hat said: “As customers scale Kubernetes environments across hybrid clouds, advanced management capabilities become critical to the continued success of these cloud-native strategies. Our experience and expertise with Kubernetes, starting with the project’s founding, paired with offering the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform in Red Hat OpenShift, makes Red Hat well-positioned to address the new management needs of the cloud-native era. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is engineered to do exactly that, focusing on consistently managing Kubernetes clusters across all footprints: on prem, across multiple clouds or at the edge, helping to drive a coherent, manageable future for enterprise software.”

Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president for Cloud Management, IDC comments: "The rapid adoption of cloud-native applications that use microservices and containers is driving deployment of more and more Kubernetes clusters across public and private cloud environments, including edge locations. To manage business risk, compliance and application performance, enterprises need a way to ensure uniform configuration and control of the infrastructure supporting these clusters. Consistent, policy-driven, cross-cloud automation of resource discovery, inventory, tagging and use of predefined GitOps templates helps to eliminate ad hoc interventions that create operational risk due to configuration errors and potential security breaches. To continue to scale cloud-native application development and operations, enterprises need consistent multicluster automation."

Carlos Enrique Caicedo Bastidas, Ph.D., associate professor at the School of Information Studies and director of the Center for Emerging Network Technologies, Syracuse University adds: "At Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies (iSchool), our Master’s Degree in Enterprise Data System program explores leading edge enterprise infrastructure automation and management techniques that IT professionals need in modern business settings. With our long standing relationship with Red Hat, its Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes further deepens students’ ability to learn and master the best practices and technologies critical to success in enterprise data infrastructure modernization initiatives. Red Hat OpenShift and Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes will also allow us to deliver a consistent and reliable platform for our Data Science labs and coursework, helping us maintain our leading information technology programs."