Enabling IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management to Connect Kubernetes Clusters Using IBM Secure Gateway

In today's dynamically changing IT landscape, it is highly likely that a company's cloud strategy spans multiple cloud providers. Such a span is known as the hydrid multi-cloud landscape.

The challenges that quickly surface in an IT department's list of responsibilities now encompass managing environments that are running on multiple cloud providers. The traditional IT administrators find themselves using individual dashboards for each of the cloud providers to monitor and manage those environments. In turn, each of the cloud provider's dashboards have their own unique features that require a learning curve to become productive.

The traditional IT administrator must now become a specialized hybrid cloud engineer with different hats for each of the cloud providers. This dynamic led to the quick realization of the need for a tool that provides a common dashboard for managing a company's hybrid cloud landscape. IBM® is one such company that quickly recognized this need and used their experience in years of systems management tools created the IBM Cloud® Pak for Multicloud Management.

This paper describes the steps that are required to connect a Kubernetes management dashboard that is provided with the IBM Cloud Pak® for Multicloud Management running on an on-premises private cloud to Kubernetes clusters that are running on public clouds. An IBM Cloud service that is called IBM Secure Gateway is at the core of this connection. The procedure to set up the Kubernetes clusters to use the IBM Secure Gateway service also is described this paper.