IBM this week offered a peak at its Cloud Satellite service, which will allow users to run their IBM Cloud service on-premises or in edge locations managed through a single pane of glass in the public cloud. The product moves IBM a bit closer to similar public cloud extensions announced by rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

The platform uses IBM’s Cloud as a base and includes IBM Cloud Observability in order to provide a centralized view of running clusters and the services running in those clusters.

Running on top of that base is a control plane that is designed to abstract away the operational details into a single management layer. The control plane uses a config component based on the IBM-developed Razee continuous delivery (CD) tool that allows developers to manage applications in their Kubernetes-based cluster deployments. The control plane also uses the Istio-based Satellite Mesh service mesh that allows for management of applications across environments.

That set up can then be used to run and manage applications running in on-premises, hybrid edge, or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environments. Users can then use the systems to set up Cloud Satellite hosts to run in those locations. These hosts serve as a pool of resources designated to run the cloud services and applications and make up a satellite location. From there, these satellite locations can use what IBM calls a satellite link to link back from the cloud edge location to the control plane. The satellite link is not a real satellite link, but it does allow a user to manage networking requirements for the applications like firewalls and auditing.

On top of all of this is IBM’s managed services. The main platform will have the applications running on Red Hat’s OpenShift clusters that are managed by the control plane. Other services include databases and DevOps tools and APIs into developer tools like Knative.

Hillery Hunter, IBM Cloud CTO, explained during this week’s IBM Think Digital event that the platform “is all about business agility, it's about automating the deployment and management of cloud native services across all of our clients computing environments.”

The Cloud Satellite service is also highly reliant on Kubernetes, which is core to Red Hat’s OpenShift platform and an increasingly important part of IBM’s hybrid-cloud focus.

Hunter said that the service allows users to run their workloads “where it makes the most sense,” and “unlike other public clouds IBM Cloud is explicitly architected with an open source Kubernetes foundation we live and breathe Kubernetes and OpenShift-as-a-service in everything that we do.”

The Satellite Cloud service also moves IBM closer to similar multi-cloud management offerings from its competitors.

Microsoft, for instance, last fall rolled out its Arc platform that allows Microsoft customers to manage their data and applications that reside on either its Azure cloud or public cloud offerings from rivals like AWS and Google Cloud. That cross-cloud management includes data and services running in virtual machines (VMs), containers, or Kubernetes, and also allows enterprises to enforce a single security posture across those data sources or applications.

Microsoft last month expanded that reach into Red Hat’s OpenShift and Enterprise Linux (RHEL) environments to simplify the management of applications running across those platforms.

AWS offers a similar feature set with its Outposts platform as does Google with its Anthos product.