Connecting and orchestrating different clouds, including those in hybrid environments, will no longer be a problem for organizations of various sizes with ambitious goals. With Red Hat Connectivity Link, a solution launched by Red Hat earlier this week, companies can integrate advanced traffic management and role-based access control (RBAC) directly into the Kubernetes system, enhancing security and compliance across the entire IT sector.
Additionally, thanks to Red Hat Connectivity Link, application development and platform engineering teams can manage application connectivity in single or multi-cluster Kubernetes environments—streamlining the definition, management, and visibility of connectivity settings and policies. The platform also enables organizations to reduce complexity by consolidating functions such as traffic routing, security, and policy management into a single Kubernetes-native solution.
According to Sarwar Raza, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s developer applications business unit, the software represents a breakthrough in how organizations approach their technology journey. “Application connectivity within and around infrastructure environments is fundamental to developing and scaling cloud-native workloads, such as generative AI applications. With Red Hat Connectivity Link, platform engineers and application developers can streamline operations, scale more efficiently across various environments, and enhance security and compliance management across multiple infrastructure layers using new cloud-native standards,” he stated.
Reducing complexity through a unified approach
The adoption of cloud-native architectures, containers, and Kubernetes has driven an explosion of applications, services, and endpoints. In turn, this has increased both the need and the challenges of setting up and governing connections between these components. Applications can span Kubernetes clusters, data centers, and cloud providers. Technological advancements in generative AI (gen AI) and edge deployments are adding further complexity and introducing new requirements for security and traffic management. With many organizations running applications in on-premises and multi-cloud environments, deploying containers and virtual machines, managing application connectivity proves complicated, costly, and error-prone.
Historically, organizations needed to implement individual tools for tasks such as API security and rate limiting, service meshes, and application networking. Relying on multiple solutions requires product-specific expertise and time spent integrating these solutions with each other and the Kubernetes environment. This leads to layers of complexity in configuring and administering these environments. Red Hat Connectivity Link provides a new approach to application connectivity with a unified environment for development and platform teams to manage connectivity through a single solution.
Built on the open-source Kuadrant project, Red Hat Connectivity Link is a Kubernetes-native solution designed to deliver a cohesive experience and an efficient approach to managing application traffic. It leverages the new standard Kubernetes Gateway API and the widely adopted Envoy proxy technology to create integrated functionality and management experience for single and multi-cluster Kubernetes environments. The Red Hat Connectivity Link approach addresses the connectivity challenges faced by modern IT organizations with a single, integrated solution rather than a complex, layered, multi-product approach.
OpenShift users can utilize Red Hat Connectivity Link for a more consistent and efficient connectivity management experience across clusters. With support for orchestrators such as Istio and OpenShift Service Mesh, users gain greater compatibility and flexibility in managing application connectivity across a wide range of Kubernetes environments.
Availability
Red Hat Connectivity Link is now available. More information can be found here. Red Hat Connectivity Link is now available. More information can be found here. Red Hat Connectivity Link is now available. More information can be found here.
