Feature Overview

• Today, the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management is built upon the Open Cluster Management multi-cluster control plane and extended with functionality with projects across the CNCF landscape. As product requirements have grown, RHACM has become increasingly larger and the architecture increasingly more monolithic. Furthermore, the architecture meets technical limitations by deploying the RHACM control plane on top of the OpenShift cluster.  This work seeks to explore how we can minituarize, modularize, and virtualize the RHACM control plane.

Slack: #forum-acm-nextgen-controlplane

Goals

• Minituarize the RHACM control plane:
  • Reduce the resource consumption footprint of the control plane
  • Reduce the number of components that operate out-of-the-box for the control plane.
  • Allow for cost control at high scale and user hosting at minimal cost.
• Modularize the RHACM control plane:
  • Allow for a more flexible extensibility pattern where capability can be added or removed as needed.
  • Simplify Disaster Recovery for the RHACM control plane.

• Virtualize the RHACM data plane:
  • Deploy an independent Kubernetes API server for use by the RHACM control plane only.
  • Stop using the underlying OpenShift/Kubernetes cluster as a data plane for the RHACM control plane.
  • Remove the hosting platform requirement and restrictions
    • Provide for an appliance model (container, MicroShift VM, RHEL Podman or any CNCF Kubernetes).
  • Improve the portability of the RHACM control plane
  • Improve the availability of the RHACM control plane
  • Interconnectability

Use Cases

• xCM
  • The Next Generation Control Planes can run in the customer's cloud account or data center and connect back to console.redhat.com.
    • The network connection to console.redhat.com will be a pull model. This provides a more secure connection that prevents Red Hat from directly reaching into a customer's infrastructure and ensuring sensitive credentials are stored within the customer's infrastructure boundaries.
    • The cost of ownership will be moved to the customer, reducing operating costs for Red Hat. Upon accomplishing the three goals, the control plane will be able to run with minimal resource requirements including in a x-small or small AMI in AWS.
    • Upon accomplishing the three goals, the control plane will be able to run with minimal resource requirements including in a X-Small or Small AMI in AWS. Therefore, we can move the cost of ownership away from Red Hat
• Additional layered services on top of xCM including a Configuration Management Service implementation.

Previous Work

• Standalone Open Cluster Management control plane and KCP were inspirations for this work

Reference material

• ACM Lite
• Next Generation Control Plane Proposal
• Next Gen Control Plane Miro Board