Dell Technologies APEX Cloud Platform Management Experience

In this presentation, Michael Wells, Tech Marketing Engineer at Dell Technologies, discusses the management experience of the APEX Cloud Platform. He highlights the platform’s ability to provide a consistent hybrid management experience across different environments without requiring users to leave their usual management interfaces.

Wells demonstrates the integration of Dell APEX Cloud Platform within the OpenShift web console, showing how users can view node information, cluster status, CPU and memory usage, and manage hardware components directly from the console. He mentions that the platform is set to support hosted control planes (formerly HyperShift) and discusses the ability to expand or remove worker nodes within the cluster.

He also covers the platform’s update mechanism, security features (including certificate management), and support capabilities, such as dial-home alerts and integration with Cloud IQ for hardware-related issues. Additionally, Wells touches on how hardware alerts are integrated into OpenShift alerting, allowing users to leverage existing monitoring and notification setups.

Wells then shifts to discussing the Azure side of things, showing similar capabilities within the Windows Admin Center for Azure Stack HCI, including physical views of nodes, detailed component information, and compliance checks.

Finally, he emphasizes the consistency of the Dell APEX Cloud Platform across different cloud operating systems and how it integrates infrastructure management with cluster management tools used by administrators. He notes the upcoming VMware integration and the ability to lock infrastructure settings for security.