Red Hat Services Interconnect and IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh

Red Hat Services Interconnect: In order to successfully navigate the complex world of modern enterprise applications, it is necessary for there to be collaboration between various personas in order to effectively manage complexity. Through the use of applications that automate essential workflows, this contributes to the provision of continuous business support. 

DevOps and CloudOps have traditionally been aligned with applications and the infrastructure upon which they are hosted. Nevertheless, the emergence of FinOps, which focuses on expense monitoring and control, was brought about by the rising costs that were caused by the diverse IT environments. 

Through the use of a variety of personas in application deployment, highly complex workflows have been introduced. DevOps is typically responsible for initiating requests, which are then reviewed by teams from CloudOps, NetOps, SecOps, and FinOps. Because of these intricate workflows, application update times are prolonged, which can occasionally have an effect on business processes and the level of satisfaction experienced by customers.

Red Hat Services Interconnect: An Introduction to the Concept

The goal of Red Hat Services Interconnect (RHSI), which is based on the well-known open-source project Skupper, is to make the hybrid cloud connectivity that applications require more straightforward. It gives the DevOps teams the ability to obtain the connectivity that they require without the need for special privileges or the necessity of relying on complicated VPN connections and specific firewall rules.

A significant acceleration of the application deployment workflow is achieved as a result of this, and business users are able to respond with greater agility to the requirements of their customers. Due to the fact that it does not require any new connections to be made at the infrastructure level, new firewall rules to be added, or ports to be opened, this also contributes to the preservation of the overall CloudOps and SecOps posture. 

The technology that lies beneath Red Hat Services Interconnect (RHSI) is responsible for reducing the dependence on the mechanisms of the L3 layer in order to create application tunnels. The use of a virtual private network (VPN) mechanism, such as an IPSec tunnel or any other equivalent tunneling mechanisms at the L3 level, is the primary goal of any L3-based transport. As a result of the fact that these tunnels are going to be provisioned and terminated in the routers that are going to be deployed in the application infrastructure, the NetOps and SecOps teams are going to be the ones to own and provision them.

Alternatively, Red Hat Services Interconnect (RHSI) focuses on the creation of application-level tunnels at a higher layer and employs a well-known messaging infrastructure to transport them at a layer above IP. This is an alternative to IP. A standard application layer messaging protocol that is open to the public is utilized by RHSI. Because of this, the DevOps teams are able to produce L3 tunnels for each application with significantly less reliance on the network layer, which results in a significant increase in their overall efficiency. 

RHSI is also deployed as a “in-cluster gateway,” which means that the gateway is deployed as close to the applications as possible. As a result, it is able to develop a greater awareness about the application environment. This is in contrast to traditional routers, which are deployed a significant distance away from the environment in which the application is hosted, and therefore can only provide a limited application awareness.

How the IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh contributes to the value ofRed Hat Services Interconnect? 

Within the realm of the IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh, there are two major components that serve as the foundation: 

A software as a service platform that serves as the management, control, and policy plane (also known as Mesh Manager) a collection of distributed gateways that are deployed in close proximity to application workloads within the application environment (also known as Gateway).

Under the circumstances described above, RHSI fulfills the function of the gateway by putting into action the data plane that is required to transport application traffic between various locations. Outside of the data plane, there are still a great deal of complexities that need to be addressed. Some of these include the management of the gateways’ lifecycles, the rotation of certificates, the administration of policies, and, most importantly, observability.

In addition to ensuring that the DevOps users are given the ability to run faster, the Mesh Manager from IBM ensures that the CloudOps persona maintains the control that they are accustomed to experiencing, but with a significantly reduced amount of effort. Mesh Manager manages a set of distributed RHSI gateways at scale in a seamless manner. 

Move forward with Hybrid Cloud Mesh and take the next step

A technology preview of Hybrid Cloud Mesh that supports the use of Red Hat Services Interconnect (RHSI) gateways and simplifies application connectivity and security across platforms, clusters, and clouds is something that IBM are very excited to present. The Red Hat Service Interconnect was introduced on May 23, 2023, during the Red Hat Summit. Its purpose is to establish connections between services, applications, and workloads that are present in hybrid environments that are required.

They are just beginning to develop enterprise hybrid multicloud automation solutions. The Hybrid Cloud Mesh transforms businesses to maximize value from modern application architecture, not just a network solution. This allows hybrid cloud adoption and transforms multicloud use. Looking forward to your company on this journey.