Red Hat Kubernetes management update aims to boost hybrid cloud automation

Red Hat has unveiled the latest version of its Kubernetes management offering that it claimed would provide greater flexibility for managing and scaling hybrid and multi-cloud environments in a unified and automated way.

Its Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.3 includes additional support for importing managed Kubernetes clusters for Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA), as well as OpenShift clusters on IBM Power systems.

Red Hat said this builds on supported managed Kubernetes clusters for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud (ROKS), Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO), Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated (OSD) and IBM Z.

There is also support for the provision of on-premises Red Hat OpenShift clusters on Red Hat OpenStack directly from Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management. It added that customers could also manage clusters more effectively by discovering and importing clusters from cloud.redhat.com, which would help manage more advanced features and alleviate the manual effort of importing clusters individually.

Red Hat said that with cluster hibernation, customers can also schedule clusters that are not in use to go into hibernation mode to preserve resources and better manage cloud costs.

There is also better integration between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, which Red Hat claimed would accelerate the automation and cohesion between cloud-native clusters, virtual machines, and traditional infrastructure with streamlined tooling and coordination.

When containerized environments need to connect with traditional IT environments, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management can automatically trigger Ansible Playbooks before or after key lifecycle actions, such as application and cluster creation.

The company said this would make it easier to automate tasks like configuring networking, connecting applications to databases, constructing load balancers and firewalls, and updating IT service management (ITSM) ticketing systems.

Dave Lindquist, general manager and vice president, software engineering, advanced Kubernetes management at Red Hat, said cloud-native applications and services are not an island.

“We need to meet organizations where they are to bridge the divide between traditional IT infrastructure and cloud-native development so that IT teams can focus on innovation rather than trying to get disparate technologies to work together,” Lindquist said.

Tim Grieser, research vice president, enterprise system management software at IDC, said IT executives see IT automation and configuration management tools as ways to embed the competitive advantages of speed and quality. As such, investments continue to address traditional IT environments and modern application architectures.

“The reality is that both environments are critical to business success. The automation of technology processes and the orchestration of multiple processes are critical and increasingly required to enable scale for I&O teams as software delivery cycles increase,” Grieser added.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.3 will be generally available in the coming weeks.