Red Hat launches Red Hat Connectivity Link to optimize Kubernetes management

Connecting and orchestrating different clouds, including those in the hybrid environment, will no longer be a problem for organizations of different sizes and great ambitions. With Red Hat Connectivity Link, a solution launched by Red Hat at the beginning of 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 configurations 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. 

For Sarwar Raza, Vice President and General Manager of the Developer Applications Business Unit at Red Hat, the software represents an advance in the way organizations think about their technology journey. “The connectivity of applications within and around infrastructure environments is key 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 multiple environments, and increase security and compliance management across various layers of infrastructure using new cloud-native standards,” he stated. 

Reduction of 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 configuring and governing connections between these components. Applications can span Kubernetes clusters, data centers, and cloud providers. Technological advances in generative AI (gen AI) and edge deployments are bringing more complexity and introducing new requirements for security and traffic management. With many organizations running applications in on-premises environments and multiple clouds, and deploying containers and virtual machines, managing application connectivity has become complicated, costly, and prone to errors.

Historically, organizations need to implement individual tools for tasks such as API security and rate limiting, service meshes, and application networks. Relying on multiple solutions requires specific product skills and time spent integrating these solutions with each other and with the Kubernetes environment. This leads to layers of complexity in configuring and managing these environments. The Red Hat Connectivity Link provides a new path for application connectivity with a unified environment for development teams and a platform to manage connectivity through a single solution.

Based on the open source project Kuadrant, The Red Hat Connectivity Link is a native Kubernetes solution designed to provide a cohesive experience and an efficient approach to managing application traffic. It leverages the new standard Kubernetes API Gateway 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 instead of a complex, layered, multi-product approach.

OpenShift users can use the 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 in a wide variety of Kubernetes environments.

Availability

The Red Hat Connectivity Link is now available. More information can be found here. The Red Hat Connectivity Link is now available. More information can be found. here. The Red Hat Connectivity Link is now available. More information can be found. here.