Outcome Overview

As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance the capabilities of ACM in managing multi-cluster environments, we are exploring deep integrations with HCP. This includes aspects such as control-plane metrics, control-plane migration, observability, workload migration, upgrade management, disaster recovery, cluster hibernation, showback and more. 

This comprehensive enhancement is expected to drive an upsell from MCE to ACM from day one. 

Success Criteria

We are successful if we have the ability to do the following:

• Control-Plane Metrics Integration & Enhanced Control Plane observability:
  • Add more visibility into the control-plane metrics, especially in parity to metrics we provide today with standalone
  • Explore how to surface those metrics, SLAs/SLOs into ACM observability dashboards
  • Stay aligned and consolidate with efforts in OBSDA-451.
  • Focus on enhancing multi-cluster observability and performance monitoring.

• Control-Plane Migration Capability:
  • ACM is one of the very few products that can solve our multi-cluster problem, HCP makes multi-cluster faster/cheaper but it needs ACM to deeply integrate and address gaps specially relating to the HCP architecture.
  • Namely, we need to explore evolving ACM to manage control-plane migrations between management clusters, today’s means of migrating can be cumbersome and quickly outdated. We should aim for a declrative, smooth and efficient movement of control planes for various operational scenarios.

• Show-Back Integrations for HCP:
  • HCP should drastically reduce TCO.
  • ACM can immediately provide visibility into those savings
  • We should try to Implement show-back functionalities in ACM to highlight the business impact and potential cost savings associated with HCP integrations.

• Workload Migration between clusters
  • ACM is the multi-cluster go-to.
  • When it comes to moving workloads (migrating them) between OpenShift clusters, ACM is best positioned for this task.
  • Whether it’s standalone OCP or HCP, we should make sure ACM can tackle this job or delegate to other tooling with enough deep integration to make it valuable. 

• Conditional Upgrades and Pre-Checks:
  • Whether it’s upgrade one cluster of a set of clusters (a clusterset), upgrades is a problem that is excalibrated at the multicluster layer.
  • We should figure out how to Integrate conditional upgrade processes and pre-check mechanisms in ACM to address common customer concerns and enhance upgrade reliability.

• Disaster Recovery (DR) Scenarios:
  • Can ACM trigger automated backup/recovery for select clusters and their control-planes. 

• Cluster Hibernation Features:
  • HCP already provides scale to zero, but this is not real hibernation.
  • Hibernation can be pausing an instance.
  • We should explore how to “Hibernate” HCP clusters from ACM.

Expected Results (what, how, when)

• Increase the number of customers upselling to ACM and OPP (sales conversion rate).
• Overall customer satisfaction (e.g., NPS)

Post Completion Review – Actual Results

• Be able to communicate the cost savings a customer will achieve by incorporating ACM and HCP in their strategy. 
• ACM HCP feature utilization rate