Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Connectivity Link, a
hybrid multicloud application connectivity solution that provides a
modern approach to connecting disparate applications and infrastructure.
Red Hat Connectivity Link integrates advanced traffic management, policy
enforcement and role-based access control (RBAC) directly within
Kubernetes, enhancing security and compliance across multiple layers of
application infrastructure. Application development and platform
engineering teams can now manage application connectivity across single
and multi-cluster Kubernetes environments — streamlining the
definition, management and visibility of connectivity configuration and
policies. Red Hat Connectivity Link enables organizations to reduce
complexity by consolidating functions such as traffic routing, security
and policy management functions into a single Kubernetes-native
solution.
Reduced complexity through a unified approach
The adoption of cloud-native architectures, containers and Kubernetes
has fostered an explosion of applications, services and endpoints. In
turn, this has increased both the need for and challenges of configuring
and governing connections between these components. Applications can
span Kubernetes clusters, data centers and cloud providers. Technology
evolutions 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 across
on-premise environments and multiple clouds, and deploying containers
and virtual machines, managing application connectivity can be
complicated, error-prone and inefficient.
Historically, organizations have needed to implement individual tools
for tasks like API security and rate limiting, service mesh and
application networking. Relying on multiple solutions requires
product-specific skills and time spent integrating these solutions
together with each other and the Kubernetes environment. This leads to
layers of complexity in setting up and administering these environments.
Red Hat Connectivity Link provides a new pathway to application
connectivity with a unified environment for both development and
platform teams to manage connectivity through a single solution.
Based on the open source Kuadrant project,
Red Hat Connectivity Link is a Kubernetes-native solution designed to
provide a cohesive experience and efficient approach to managing
application traffic. It leverages the new Kubernetes-standard Gateway
API and the broadly-adopted Envoy proxy technology to create an
integrated functionality and management experience for single and
multi-cluster Kubernetes environments. Authentication policies, rate
limiting, DNS configuration and TLS management are specified through
Kubernetes objects; operational data is surfaced through Kubernetes and
customizable dashboards. The Red Hat Connectivity Link approach
addresses connectivity challenges faced by modern IT organizations with a
single, integrated solution rather than a complex, layered,
multi-product approach.
Red Hat 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 greater compatibility and flexibility in
managing application connectivity within a wide range of Kubernetes
environments.
Availability
Red Hat Connectivity Link is now generally available.
