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How Anthos Config Management Helps to Manage Clusters and Security Policies?

How Anthos Config Management Helps to Manage Clusters and Security Policies?

What is Anthos Config Management?

Anthos is Google’s multi-cloud, hybrid application platform and it is their first official release for enterprises. It is a modern and innovative platform that bridges the gap between on-premises and cloud environments with its efficient and secure set of features.

When dealing with hybrid and multi-cloud container environments, security plays a vital role. And that’s when Anthos Config Management comes in!

Anthos Config Management allows users to securely and quickly create common configuration across a hybrid and multi-cloud container environment. Admins can easily apply custom policies across clouds as well as on-premises platforms.

Anthos Config Management will evaluate whatever changes are made and roll them out to all Kubernetes clusters. This is to make sure the desired state in the Git repository is reflected well.

Why do you need Anthos Config Management?

Kubernetes lies at the heart of Anthos- and it is one of the most popular open-source projects by Google. 

Built upon GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine), users can seamlessly manage their infrastructure, deployed across both on-premises data centers and cloud providers such as Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.

While GKE is convenient, managing multiple GKE deployments in multiple locations can get hectic. That’s because you need to keep the deployments in sync with regards to their security policies (RBAC), configuration, namespaces, resource configurations, etc. 

When an application is deployed in different environments, often users face ‘configuration drift’ issues. Users start to use the applications and change the configuration, and if the clusters aren’t in sync, they will behave differently in different environments.

To avoid this, Anthos Config Management takes the configuration-as-code approach and provides a strong, centralized, version-controlled configuration and policy management platform. Here, descriptive templates are stored and maintained Git repository in the form of code. It makes sure there is consistent behavior across all your clusters, and bad configuration changes are rolled back to their previous healthy state.

Let us look at the innovative set of features of Anthos Config Management that allows enterprises to manage security policies and clusters across their infrastructure:

Features of Anthos Config Management:

Define and Employ security policies across Kubernetes clusters

Anthos Config Management consistently keeps a check on the status of Kubernetes deployments and applies the policies to achieve the desired state. 

It makes use of the central Git repository to view and manage security and access-control policies. This includes all settings for Kubernetes clusters such as Namespace, ResourceQuota, ClusterRole, RoleBinding, etc. in both cloud as well as on-premises.

  • Define common configuration for all Kubernetes clusters of your infrastructure via Git repository. Easily manage configuration for any of your Kubernetes API, and even the policies such as ResourceQuota, Istio service mesh and other access-control policies.
  • Roll out configuration and enforce them across all clusters to make sure the desired state is achieved and maintained throughout. Git repositories store all the configurations to be employed across clusters. 

Configuration Formats

Users can quickly migrate existing definitions with YAML or JSON native Kubernetes configuration formats to store the policies.

Customize policies at scale

Not just creating a common configuration, but Anthos Config Management also lets you customize the policies and enforce them across cloud and on-premises clusters. 

  • Customize policies: You can seamlessly configure different policies for different namespaces or groups of clusters.
  • Apply custom policies: Create and apply custom policies that are not included by native Kubernetes objects, so as to meet the security and compliance needs of your enterprise. Custom rules will let you monitor all updates done to your infrastructure and remove changes that don’t follow your custom policies.

Default Security

Security plays a key role for your enterprise infrastructure, be it on-premises or cloud environment, especially when you add new team members. 

Anthos Config Management creates a reliable environment, so that developers get security by default and can apply desired cluster configuration settings. This will allow new employees or team members to be up and running faster. Not just that, Config Management also prevents admins from making accidental errors.

  • Validation: Anthos Config Management has built-in validators that won’t push bad configurations to your Git repository. It will review every single line of code for valid syntax and to see if it complies with custom policies, before sending it forward.
  • Source Control: It lets you control configuration changes seamlessly in separate branches, roll back clusters to their previous state and collaborate to review codes.
  • Code Review: Review all configurations with Config Management’s built-in code review process carried out within Git repository.

Monitoring and Auditing Clusters

As enterprises scale with time, their Kubernetes deployments continue to grow. Teams might keep adding more clusters to meet the needs of global coverage, high availability and edge computing. But every newly added cluster comes with its own overhead to manage the set of configurations.

Anthos Config Management offers a powerful, centralized platform where you can easily manage your multi-cluster environment. Most importantly, this platform scales with your enterprise.

  • Monitor clusters: Consistently monitor the cluster statuses with the help of declarative model to apply compliance policies. This prevents you from potential configuration drifts.
  • Auditing: Config Management consistently audits your Anthos infrastructure to keep a check on clusters that don’t follow enterprises’ custom rules.

Resource configuration

Manage the configuration of Google Cloud resources such as Identity and Access Management or Cloud, via Config Connector integration of Anthos Config Management.

Wrap Up:

As Kubernetes cluster applications continue to expand, the need for a centralized, well-integrated platform to manage configurations grows. 

Anthos Config Management is an exceptional configuration management tool that will keep all your security and compliance issues at bay.

Enterprises will be able to seamlessly upgrade their applications and manage configurations and policies across all their clusters through a single secure and centralized platform. This simplifies the whole process of defining and employing compliance rules across your entire cluster environment.

 

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