Connecting and orchestrating different clouds, including those in the hybrid environment, will no longer be a problem for organizations of various sizes and large aspirations. 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 IT sector.
Furthermore, thanks to Red Hat Connectivity Link, application development teams and platform engineering 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 native Kubernetes solution.
For Sarwar Raza, Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat’s Application Developers Business Unit, the software represents an advancement in the way organizations think about their technology journey. “Application connectivity within and around infrastructure environments is crucial for developing and scaling native cloud 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 enhance security and compliance management at various layers of infrastructure using new cloud-native standards,” he stated.
Reduction of complexity through a unified approach
The adoption of native cloud architectures, containers, and Kubernetes has driven an explosion of applications, services, and endpoints. This, in turn, has increased both the need and challenges of configuring and governing connections between these components. Applications may span Kubernetes clusters, data centers, and cloud providers. Technological advancements in generative 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 and multi-cloud environments, deploying containers and virtual machines, managing application connectivity proves to be complex, costly, and error-prone.
Historically, organizations have needed to implement individual tools for tasks like API security and rate limiting, service meshes, and application networking. 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. 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 Kuadrant open source project, Red Hat Connectivity Link is a Kubernetes-native solution designed to provide a seamless experience and efficient approach to managing application traffic. It leverages the new Kubernetes standard API Gateway and widely adopted Envoy proxy technology to create integrated functionality and management experience for single-cluster 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 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 increased compatibility and flexibility in managing application connectivity in a wide range 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.
