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Open Cluster Management

Open Cluster Management is an open-source project for declarative multi-cluster Kubernetes management, governance, and application lifecycle control (infrastructure automation / platform orchestration).

  • Declarative registration and management of multiple Kubernetes clusters from a central hub (infrastructure automation).
  • Policy-based governance, compliance, and configuration enforcement across clusters (governance / security configuration management).
  • Application lifecycle management for deploying and updating workloads to one or more clusters (application delivery / GitOps-aligned deployment).
  • Extensible architecture with APIs, add-ons, and integration points for cluster observability and additional controllers (platform extensibility / observability).
  • Support for hybrid and multicloud Kubernetes environments through cluster grouping, placement rules, and dynamic scheduling (multi-cluster management).

More About Open Cluster Management

Open Cluster Management is an open-source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that focuses on managing multiple Kubernetes clusters and the workloads and policies applied to them. It addresses the problem of operating distributed clusters across on-premises (on-prem), public cloud, and edge environments by providing a hub-and-spoke control model. In this model, a central “hub” cluster manages many “managed” clusters using Kubernetes-native APIs and custom resources (multi-cluster management / infrastructure automation).

The project provides a set of Kubernetes custom resource definitions (CRDs), controllers, and APIs that enable declarative control of cluster registration, placement, governance, and workload deployment (platform orchestration). Administrators can register external Kubernetes clusters to the hub cluster, where each managed cluster is represented by resources that track cluster metadata, status, and available capacity. This model supports both OpenShift and upstream Kubernetes distributions, as documented in project materials.

One core capability is policy-based governance and configuration management (governance / security configuration management). Policies are defined as Kubernetes resources and can describe configuration baselines, security controls, or compliance requirements. The governance framework evaluates clusters against these policies and can be configured to enforce desired state, flag violations, or report compliance status. Policy placement uses cluster labels and placement rules to target specific groups of clusters, such as by environment, region, or provider.

Open Cluster Management also addresses multi-cluster application lifecycle management (application delivery). It introduces resources for defining applications, subscriptions, and channels that describe where manifests are stored and how they should be deployed across clusters. This supports GitOps-aligned workflows by consuming manifests from Git repositories, Helm repositories, or object storage. Placement rules determine which clusters receive an application, and controllers reconcile desired application state across those clusters.

The architecture follows Kubernetes principles, using controllers running on the hub cluster to reconcile desired state for both clusters and applications (cloud-native control plane). Communication with managed clusters uses Kubernetes APIs and agents that run on those clusters. The system supports add-ons for features such as observability, search, and cluster configuration, exposed through documented APIs and extension points (platform extensibility / observability).

In enterprise environments, Open Cluster Management is used to centralize control of fleets of Kubernetes clusters that may span data centers and multiple cloud providers (hybrid and multicloud operations). Platform teams use it to standardize governance policies, manage cluster groups, and automate rollout of applications or configuration bundles to targeted clusters. Its use of Kubernetes-native constructs allows integration with existing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), GitOps, and security tooling, and positions the project in directories and taxonomies under categories such as multi-cluster Kubernetes management, policy and governance, and application lifecycle management.