Persona warfare in the world of enterprise applications – how IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh and Red Hat Services Interconnect bring them together

Navigating the complex terrain of modern enterprise applications requires collaboration across a variety of people to effectively manage complexity. This helps support ongoing business through applications that automate essential workflows.

Traditionally, applications and their hosting infrastructure are aligned with DevOps and CloudOps. However, rising costs due to diverse IT environments have led to the emergence of FinOps, which focuses on cost monitoring and control.

Different personas in application deployment introduce very complex workflows. Typically, DevOps initiates a request and it is scrutinized by CloudOps, NetOps, SecOps, and FinOps teams. These complex workflows result in long application update times, sometimes impacting business processes and customer satisfaction.

Introduction to Red Hat Service Interconnect

Based on the popular open source project Skupper, Red Hat Services Interconnect (RHSI) aims to simplify the hybrid cloud connectivity needed by applications. This allows DevOps teams to get the connectivity they need without having to rely on special permissions, complicated VPN connections, and special firewall rules. This significantly accelerates application deployment workflows and allows business users to be more agile in responding to customer needs. This also helps maintain overall CloudOps and SecOps health by not requiring you to establish new connections, add new firewall rules, or open ports at the infrastructure level.

RHSI—the technology behind it

RHSI reduces dependency on L3 layer mechanisms to create application tunnels. By default, all L3-based transport uses a VPN mechanism, such as an IPSec tunnel or other equivalent tunneling mechanism in L3. These tunnels must be owned and provisioned by NetOps and SecOps teams as they are provisioned and terminated on routers deployed in the application infrastructure. As an alternative, RHSI focuses on creating application-level tunnels at the upper layers and transporting them at the layer above IP using well-known messaging infrastructures. RHSI uses an open standard application layer messaging protocol. This significantly improves the efficiency of DevOps teams by reducing dependency on the network layer to create L3 tunnels for each application.

RHSI is also deployed as an “intra-cluster gateway”. This means that gateways are deployed as close to the application as possible, allowing them to develop greater awareness of the application environment compared to traditional routers. Because it is well deployed outside of the application hosting environment, it can only provide limited application awareness.

How IBM® Hybrid Cloud Mesh adds value to RHSI

There are two big components to the world of IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh:

• SaaS platform that serves as the management, control and policy area (also known as mesh manager)

• A set of distributed gateways deployed close to application workloads within the application environment (also known as gateways).

Above, RHSI acts as a gateway, implementing the data plane required to transport application traffic across multiple locations. Outside of the data plane, there is still a lot of complexity to deal with, including lifecycle management of gateways, certificate rotation, policy management, and more importantly, observability. IBM’s Mesh Manager seamlessly manages a large, distributed set of RHSI gateways and allows DevOps users to run faster while ensuring CloudOps personas retain the control they once experienced with significantly less effort.

Take the next step with hybrid cloud mesh

We’re excited to present a technology preview of Hybrid Cloud Mesh, which enables the use of RHSI gateways to simplify application connectivity and security across platforms, clusters, and clouds. Announced at the Red Hat Summit on May 23, 2023, Red Hat Service Interconnect creates connections between services, applications, and workloads across hybrid mission-critical environments.

We are just beginning our journey to build a comprehensive hybrid multicloud automation solution for enterprises. Hybrid cloud mesh is more than just a network solution. It is designed to be a transformative force, enabling hybrid cloud adoption and transforming the way multicloud environments are leveraged by helping enterprises derive maximum value from modern application architectures. We hope you will join us on that journey.