Notes

Main Documentation
Link to the official Google documentation: [INSERT LINK HERE]

Fleet Management Overview

Current Situation:
Organizations often face the challenge of managing multiple distributed clusters across various environments, each requiring individual attention and manual oversight. This scattered approach to management can become increasingly complex and time-consuming as clusters scale in number and in functionality.

Solution:
Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) provides a Fleet Management capability, allowing clusters to be grouped into "fleets." Fleets enable the collective management of clusters, significantly reducing operational overhead and ensuring a more streamlined and consistent management approach. This "fleet-wise" management framework simplifies the task of applying configurations, policies, and security protocols across numerous clusters with a single action.

What Is Fleet Management Designed For?
Fleet Management is a centralized system that enables the efficient management and oversight of multiple Kubernetes clusters across diverse environments, all within the GDC ecosystem. It provides the flexibility to organize, manage, and configure clusters collectively, regardless of whether they are in on-premise environments, Google Cloud, or even other cloud providers like AWS.

Why Do Organizations Use Multiple Clusters?
While it is generally recommended to maintain as few clusters as possible for simplicity and cost efficiency, there are various scenarios where multiple clusters are necessary:

Geographic separation: Organizations may create clusters in different locations to meet data residency, regulatory requirements, or latency needs.
Scaling applications: In large, complex environments with numerous applications, additional clusters might be required to isolate workloads and resources for operational and security reasons.
Environmental diversity: To manage workloads across on-premise and cloud environments, organizations may deploy separate clusters tailored to each unique environment.
Why Is a Fleet Management System Needed?
Managing clusters on an individual basis can quickly become an unsustainable practice, especially as environments scale. Fleet Management abstracts and simplifies the task by grouping clusters into fleets, allowing for centralized management and orchestration. With Fleet Management:

Clusters are grouped into fleets: Each fleet consists of multiple clusters, reducing the need to manage clusters individually.
Multiple fleets are supported: Organizations can set up and manage different fleets for different regions, departments, or environments, enabling flexible and segmented management strategies.
Fleet Management System Components

Fleet Service (Hub Service):
The Hub Service, often referred to as the Fleet Service, is the central controller for fleets within Google Distributed Cloud. This service enables users to configure and manage fleets, ensuring that clusters within a fleet receive the necessary policies, configurations, and updates in a unified manner.

Benefits of Fleet Management:
By using Fleet Management, organizations can:

Apply changes globally across clusters: Updates, configurations, or policies only need to be applied once, reducing the repetitive work associated with individual cluster management.
Improve consistency: Fleets help maintain consistent configurations across clusters, reducing discrepancies and potential errors.
Streamline security compliance: With centralized management, security policies and access controls can be uniformly enforced, improving compliance across all managed clusters.
Creating and Configuring Fleets

How to Create a Fleet:
A fleet is created by assigning clusters to it. This can be done during the initial setup of a cluster or as part of the post-deployment configuration. Adding clusters to a fleet ensures they inherit fleet-wide configurations and policies from the outset.

Can Clusters Be Added to Fleets Later?
Yes, clusters can be added to fleets at any time. However, the best practice is to assign a cluster to a fleet from the beginning, a practice known as "born-to-fleet." This approach helps ensure clusters are managed within the fleet framework right from deployment, reducing onboarding time and increasing operational efficiency.

Cross-Cloud Integration:
Fleet Management supports the integration of clusters hosted outside of Google Distributed Cloud, including clusters on other cloud providers such as AWS. This allows organizations to manage hybrid environments seamlessly within the GDC Fleet Management framework.

Fleet Configuration Options

Within the Feature Manager tab, users can configure the following capabilities to enhance fleet management:

Service Mesh:

Manages and monitors all network traffic between services within clusters.
As workloads grow and environments become more fragmented, the Service Mesh helps mitigate complexity and simplifies the management of microservices, providing visibility and control over inter-service communications.
Security Posture Management:

Tools like Cloud Logging, Policy Controller, and Binary Authorization enhance visibility into security status and reinforce protection measures across clusters.
Centralized security policies and logging allow for consistent security management, aiding compliance with regulatory standards.
Config Sync:

Based on an open-source core, Config Sync enables cluster operators and platform administrators to deploy configurations from a centralized repository. This approach simplifies configuration management, ensuring clusters are up-to-date with minimal manual intervention.
Policies:

Custom policies can be implemented to enforce compliance, such as requiring each namespace to have a specific label. This policy enforcement ensures better resource management and cost tracking, especially when using GKE Usage.
Identity Service:

Manages user authentication and access settings, allowing administrators to control login permissions and manage user credentials securely across fleets.
Multi-Cluster Ingress:

Multi-Cluster Ingress allows for network traffic distribution across clusters, ensuring high availability and load balancing. It simplifies traffic management for services hosted across multiple clusters.
Knative Serving:

The Knative Serving project provides tools for deploying serverless containers, offering features like:
Rapid deployment of containerized services.
Autoscaling capabilities, including scaling to zero when services are idle.
Networking and routing capabilities for efficient traffic handling.
Point-in-time snapshots for versioned deployments of code and configurations, aiding in rollback and historical tracking.
Limitations and Testing
Due to access restrictions, practical testing of Fleet Management capabilities in Google Distributed Cloud was not feasible at this stage.