Containers are increasingly important in addressing critical concerns for application developers, including the need for faster delivery, agility and portability.

As they become popular, the multicluster environment tends to grow and a management system becomes necessary, according to Dave Lindquist (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of engineering and hybrid cloud management at Red Hat Inc.

“As customers start embracing the development with containers and leveraging Kubernetes, you start finding that they’re putting up clusters across their data centers, across cloud, to support different parts of the life cycle of development or supporting their own production environment or distributed workloads,” he said. “And, so, the challenges that operations and management run into, and security in particular, is how do you start managing the clusters, their life cycle.”

Lindquist, Joe Fernandes (pictured, center), vice president and general manager of core cloud platforms at Red Hat, and Tom Anderson (pictured, left), vice president of the Ansible automation platform at Red Hat, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AnsibleFest 2020. They discussed the role of the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, how it can help with compliance, and the connection between this environment and the open-source automation platform Ansible. (* Disclosure below.)

Number of clusters grows sharply

There are several reasons why an organization may deploy or need to deploy more than one Kubernetes cluster. Within a cluster, an organization can have multiple applications, multiple developers and multiple work teams, but as it starts to scale up its use, it may want additional clusters.

“It could be because you want to separate your production environments from your dev and test environments. It could be for capacity, [when] you have more development teams or more production environments than you want to sort of tie to a single cluster,” Fernandes explained.

In addition, when companies start to expand out applications to different locations, such as data centers and multiple public clouds, the number of clusters increases a lot. And as they move toward edge computing deployments, this amount could actually explode to hundreds or thousands.

“You need a sane way to manage across all these clusters, regardless of where they run and regardless of how many you have, and that’s really what we’ve been working on with the Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes,” Fernandes stated.

One of the main objectives is to ensure regulatory compliance. When updating multiclusters, enterprises need to ensure they follow rules, such as those related to the Payment Card Industry, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and other various federal standards.

They also need to have deployment policies. “The challenges for … automation and security are to have a consistent policy-driven way to take care of the clusters across these hybrid environments and making sure they adhere to the compliance and security of the enterprise,” Lindquist said.

Everyone benefits from automation

To make cluster management benefit from automation, Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes has also called out into Ansible playbook.

As enterprises make OpenShift — Red Hat’s enterprise-grade container platform — operations a strategic part of their infrastructure by deploying production applications, they want to be able to link this to their other systems and other parts of their infrastructure, according to Anderson.

“Our customers have been asking us for this and talking to us about this, so it … made perfect sense to get out there and do that, get the [OpenShift and Ansible] communities together innovating, and then take that innovation out for our customer,” he said.

Automation benefits both the IT and infrastructure teams, who own the configuration and management of the clusters, and the developers, who are their consumers. For IT teams, Ansible is another automation tool in their portfolio to do the things that need to happen when the clusters are set up for the first time or when they are updated, according to Fernandes.

“So if they need to update an ITSM system or configure a network or do whatever it needs to, you have Ansible automation scripts that can be plugged in at the appropriate time in that cluster’s life cycle to do that,” he stated.

Developers may also have some automated tasks. “What they care about is the applications that they’re building, but there’s a lot that goes into building it. There’s the source code management systems; there’s the CI systems, the CD systems; there’s the test environments and stage and prod,” Fernandes pointed out. “You have Ansible again ready to take on some of those tasks.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE