OCP4 Tips P.06/OpenShift Advanced Cluster Management (ACM)

Hello All,

we have talked before about OpenShift day 2 operations, and we saw that are many tasks you need to do after you install any OpenShift cluster almost more than 20 tasks.

the problems now we have

1. let's say you have to build new cluster you will have to do the same installation and same day 2 tasks again.
2. what if I told you that, there were a change or some internal policy that force you to change some configuration in all your OpenShift clusters, we will go over cluster by cluster and apply the configuration
3. if you even automate the process and write some scripts that will apply the changes in all the clusters with just one script, how you will make sure no one someday or even you by mistake violate the policy or change the configuration, which mean there are drift between the current and desired configurations.
4. what if you have the more than type of K8s like Openshift, Tanzu and EKS. does it will be easy to just config and manage all of them one by one.

if you hate doing things manually like me and don't like to repeat yourself by doing same work again and again, then continue the article with me as you will find an interesting solution that will help you a lot in solving all above mentioned problems.

Advanced Cluster Management (ACM)

ACM is a product from RedHat that help you manage all your clusters whatever its type from one central location.

ACM benefits

• centralized management for all different clusters
• install OpenShift clusters now easy task from ACM installation guide you just answer questions and hit the install button then cluster will be automatically created for you on your desired environment.
• import existing clusters to it.
• write your configuration in a form called policy that policy can be enforced to all OpenShift or just watch which cluster violate that policy.
• you can convert all day 2 tasks to policies on ACM and once new clusters come up you just apply to it all the policies you need automatically.
• if there are any change to any policy and that change need to be applied on all clusters, you will only change the policy and ACM will do rest of actions instead of you and apply the change to all clusters you specify.
• ACM is always monitoring your clusters and report to you if any violation happened. and based on policy type it will just report the violation or enforce the policy to reapply to solve the problem or even apply ansible playbook to solve the problem.

we can convert all mentioned day 2 operations in below link to ACM policies and make ACM to the repetitive work for you, ACM will also have an eye on the clusters instead of you and it will report to any issue and even solve it by itself.

I the next article we will talk about how we convert any k8s configurations to ACM policies and how to add some intelligence to that policies so for example change some lines based on clusters name.

thanks for keep reading, hope that add something new to you.