Continuous Availability of Workloads with Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud

Integrated operational capabilities enabling you to focus on innovation

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud is a managed service that simplifies deployment and configuration of the OpenShift Container Platform. As a managed service, IBM will automate initial provisioning as well as ongoing maintenance, including operating system patches, vulnerability remediation, and any updates in the OpenShift stack.

When it is time for an upgrade, IBM will move all of the containerized workloads to other worker nodes in the cluster and provide the lifecycle management. Once the worker node is back to a healthy state, we move on to the subsequent node until the entire cluster is upgraded. With a highly available application architecture, your customers will never know maintenance is taking place.

Highly available (HA) master nodes in a multizone cluster configuration

Lifecycle management is only one aspect of a managed OpenShift offering. Another key aspect is building in operational efficiencies so you can deliver line of business objectives. We do that by supporting highly available (HA) master nodes in a multizone cluster configuration. This ensures that master and worker nodes are distributed evenly across at least three physically separate data centers (i.e., zones) within a single multizone region (MZR).

In the event of a catastrophic network outage in one data center, you still have masters and workers running in two other data centers. Again, ensuring that with auto-scaling policies in place, users would not be aware of the outage.

Another benefit to a multizone cluster is that we include a multizone application load balancer (MZALB) backed by IBM Cloud Internet Services (CIS). IBM CIS Load Balancing operates at the Authoritative DNS level. It incorporates advanced health checks to monitor the health of the origins and dynamically adjusts DNS responses. Additionally, you can configure Geo policies for Global Load Balancing (GLB).

Join the discussion

If you have questions or concerns, engage our team via Slack. You can register here and join the discussion in the #questions channel on https://ibm-container-service.slack.com.

Get started with Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.

Chris Rosen

Program Director, Offering Management

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Integrated operational capabilities enabling you to focus on innovation

Highly available (HA) master nodes in a multizone cluster configuration

Join the discussion

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