Links With A Kink, Red Hat Kubernetes-Native Connectivity Management
Red Hat Connectivity Link is a new hybrid multi-cloud application connectivity offering from the open-source Linux purists designed to connect disparate applications and infrastructure… and now it comes with additional Kubernetes-Native goodness.
Have We Been Here Before?
But wait, Red Hat offers a panoply of connectivity “solutions” such as Red Hat Service Interconnect, a technology that allows applications and services to communicate with each other (via a protected link) regardless of the environment or platform.
Plus anyway, the company used Red Hat Summit 2024 to detail the initial launch of Red Hat Connectivity Link as a cohesive platform for enhanced application performance and scalability with security capabilities through simplified deployment and management processes. Let’s not forget, even at that stage the toolset here was always founded on the open-source Kuadrant project, a technology born of Kubernetes DNA and designed to enable platform engineering-focused developers to work collaboratively to connect, secure, protect and observe their service endpoints.
And and and, Connectivity Link builds on the capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, a hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes… so it kind of feels like the Kubernetes-Native part was missing perhaps? So what’s new and special?
More K8A Control
The company says that Red Hat Connectivity Link integrates advanced traffic management, policy enforcement and role-based access control (RBAC) directly within Kubernetes, all functions designed to enhance security and compliance across multiple layers of application infrastructure.
According to Sarwar Raza, vice president and general manager for the application developer business unit at Red Hat, this means that software development and platform engineering teams can now manage application connectivity across single and multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
Mainlining On Streamlining
Essentially, what Red Hat has done with Red Hat Connectivity Link is to streamline the definition, management and visibility of connectivity configuration and policies.
What are those streamlining functions, then? We’re glad you asked… it’s all about the fact that Red Hat Connectivity Link enables data, platform and software engineers to reduce complexity by consolidating functions such as traffic routing, security and policy management functions into a single Kubernetes-native solution.
“Application connectivity, within and across distributed infrastructure environments, is fundamental to developing and scaling cloud-native workloads such as generative AI applications,” said Raza. He further reminds us that the adoption of cloud-native architectures, containers and Kubernetes has fostered an explosion of applications, services and endpoints. In turn, this has increased both the need for (and challenges of) configuring and governing connections between these components.
Beltway Bedlam For Traffic Management
Because modern enterprise applications can manifest themselves with a footprint that spans Kubernetes clusters, data centers and cloud providers – and the fact that we now have to integrate evolutions in generative AI, edge, and so on – there is a new complexity inherent to security and traffic management. With many organizations running applications across on-premise environments and multiple clouds (and deploying containers and virtual machines), managing application connectivity can be complicated, error-prone and inefficient.
According to Red Hat, historically, in a world of connectivity at this level, organizations have needed to implement individual tools for tasks like API security and rate limiting, service mesh and application networking. Because reliance on multiple solutions requires product-specific skills and time spent integrating tools, layers of complexity arise when setting up and administering these environments.
“Red Hat Connectivity Link provides a new pathway to application connectivity with a unified environment for both development and platform teams to manage connectivity through a single solution,” detailed Raza and team, in a press statement. “Red Hat OpenShift users can use Red Hat Connectivity Link for a more consistent and efficient connectivity management experience across all clusters. With support for orchestrators like Istio and OpenShift Service Mesh, users have greater compatibility and flexibility in managing application connectivity within a wide range of Kubernetes environments.”
Kubernetes-Standard Gateway API
Red Hat Connectivity Link uses the new Kubernetes-standard Gateway API and the broadly adopted Envoy proxy technology to create an integrated functionality and management experience for single and multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
Authentication policies, rate limiting, DNS configuration and Transport Layer Security (TLS) management are specified through Kubernetes objects; operational data is surfaced through Kubernetes and customizable dashboards.
“Establishing strong policies for containers and cloud environments is essential, whether you are looking at networking and traffic between your pods and clusters or for security events that take place during container deployments. With containers being so ubiquitous for cloud-native applications, improving management is imperative,” commented Loris Degioanni, founder at Sysdig. “The role for open source projects here, from the likes of Kuadrant for networking to Falco for runtime insight is clear: you want to be able to see everywhere and centralize management.”
What next for Red Hat connectivity after a solid Kuberenetes-native play like this? It’s hard to say, one would imagine that the company is looking at putting additional agentic AI automation into the total development engine being finessed here… or, perhaps, additional components that reflect the wider drive towards platform [engineering]-first architectures so that the connectivity prowess here can be applied earlier and more broadly in all system designs, or both.
