IBM Multicloud Manager

Container technologies are transforming the way enterprises build applications to support Agile development models. Kubernetes is standard for orchestrating and managing containers. With IBM Multicloud Manager, container technologies are now easier to view and manage.

IBM Multicloud Manager provides user visibility, application-centric management (policy, deployments, health, operations), and policy-based compliance across clouds and clusters. With IBM Multicloud Manager, you have control of your Kubernetes clusters. You can ensure that your clusters are secure, operating efficiently, and delivering the service levels that applications expect.

System Requirements

System requirements are found in the IBM Cloud Private product documentation at System requirements.

Cluster inventory

After you set up IBM Multicloud Manager and you log in to the console or command line tool, you can query information about all the clusters that are connected to the system. By using cluster labels, you can organize your clusters according to different cloud providers, geographic regions, data centers, and the functional purpose of individual clusters. From the console, you can view the health status of pods, nodes, persistent volumes, and applications that run in those clusters.

Multicluster operations and visibility

IBM Multicloud Manager provides a way to perform parallel queries against multiple clusters and aggregate that information by various criteria. Information is augmented by near real-time pod traffic views by using WeaveScope, which enables an understanding of how pods inter-communicate.

Using IBM Multicloud Manager , the operator can have rich views of how clusters operate within the environment. You can see dashboards of aggregated information across multiple clusters, view the topology of resources within those clusters, or navigate into individual clusters consoles for more detailed views.

See the following examples of IBM Multicloud Manager usage:

• View health of all the clusters in a specific region.
• Know how many nodes are down in all the clusters.
• View the pods in the a namespace in all development clusters
• View all the failed pods in a specific data center

Workload deployment

With IBM Multicloud Manager, you can deploy workloads on multiple clusters. IBM Multicloud Manager supports Helm charts as the deployment model by extending the IBM Cloud Private catalog to target multiple clusters for deployment. This complements any existing CI/CD pipelines by allowing operators the ability to deploy application charts that can be created in more than one cluster.

IBM Multicloud Manager also allows you to define application templates that combine deployable workloads along with placement policies. This allows you to manage all components of an application as a single unit. Placement policies define where the application components should be deployed and how many replicas there should be.

Compliance and policies

IBM Multicloud Manager enables you to check whether your clusters are operating properly by comparing the current configuration of various resources against the state that you want. The system enables you to create compliance templates that can check policies against roles, or pod objects within the clusters.

Role compliance

The role compliance template allows you to specify how Kubernetes roles should be configured to prevent cluster users from having access to unwanted functionality.

See IBM Multicloud Manager getting started for more introduction information.