There’s a slang term including the word cluster that describes a chaotic situation caused by a complex environment. It wasn’t created in response to managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across clouds, at the edge, and on-premise — but it could have been.

As containers multiplied to become a cluster, now clusters are multiplying and spreading across distributed environments. Management tools designed for virtual and physical infrastructure just can’t keep up.

“You can’t have a paradigm shift in the infrastructure and not have a corresponding paradigm shift in the management tool,” said Joe Fitzgerald (pictured), vice president and general manager of the Management Business Unit at Red Hat Inc.

Fitzgerald spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual event. They discussed Kubernetes cluster management and the general availability of Red Hat’s Advanced Cluster Management technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Kubernetes is the platform of the future, and ACM is prepared to manage it

Red Hat placed its bets on the rise of Kubernetes a long time ago, and the company has thousands of customers worldwide running on its OpenShift container management platform. Now Red Hat is betting on the expansion of Kubernetes across physical and virtual on-premises environments, multiple public clouds, and out to the edge, according to Fitzgerald.

“Management automation is going to become a necessity, so Red Hat is investing in the right areas to make sure that enterprises can use Kubernetes, particularly OpenShift, in all the environments that they want at the scale they want,” he said.

Kubernetes already provides some automation around container management. Red Hat’s Advanced Cluster Management builds on that, capturing data and events and configuration items in the environment and enabling policy definition. Announced in April for tech preview, the technology experienced great uptake during the trial period according to Fitzgerald, and is now available for general release.

Enabling cluster and application lifecycle management alongside policy-based management, ACM solves some of the biggest pain points in cluster management by providing more observability and controllability. Customers are able to “adopt more of a GitOps methodology in terms of how they’re managing their OpenShift environments,” Fitzgerald stated.

Benefits include the ability to federate the management of multiple clusters as opposed to having to manage each cluster individually and the ability to do policy-based configuration management “to just express the way you want things to stay and have them stay that way,” Fitzgerald said.

The main differentiator between ACM is that it was built from scratch for Kubernetes environments, according to Fitzgerald. “ACM’s automation on top of OpenShift automation, down the road, combining with things like Ansible, will provide the most automated environment you can have for these container platforms,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual Experience. Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE