Late last year IBM previewed the use of Red Hat Service Interconnect and Skupper gateways in IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh to simplify application connectivity and security across platforms, clusters and clouds. We are excited to announce that this capability will be generally available in the second half of July and as an upgrade for Red Hat Service Interconnect and Skupper users in third quarter.
In the new era of application modernization with large scale adoption of cloud native architectures and hybrid cloud deployments the resultant technical and organizational complexities drive higher costs and security exposures. In this hybrid multi-cloud environment, IT teams struggle with the complexity of delivering secure, predictable cloud network connectivity required by their applications.
Applications can be easily deployed and moved between environments since containers and object storage turned computing and data portable, but how about networking? Networking requires new configurations for any new environment. How can one enable portability for both applications and its associated networking?
IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh is a managed SaaS offering that puts the needs of applications first, making application networking portable across platforms, clusters, clouds, and networks. It provides an application-centric connectivity overlay with Red Hat Service Interconnect that is decoupled from any underlying network and physical infrastructure dependencies.
As a SaaS Platform Hybrid Cloud Mesh acts as the management, control and policy plane for Red Hat Service Interconnect that plays the role of the application-centric data plane needed to transport application traffic across different locations through “in-cluster” deployed gateways. The “in-cluster” deployment means that the gateway is deployed as close to the applications as possible, and therefore can develop a greater awareness about the application environment, as against the traditional routers that are deployed well outside the application hosting environment, and therefore can offer only limited application awareness.
What is application-centric connectivity with Hybrid Cloud Mesh?
The application-centric connectivity is a namespace-based message routed network overlay that abstracts the underlying networking and helps to re-establish interconnections in different environments without changes to the existing networks or applications and services it connects. No IP layer dependencies, no VPNs and no special firewall rules. Thus, applications can run anywhere: Kubernetes, Podman, VMs, and bare metal. From large multi-tenant clusters to small edge devices. And without recreating the networking.
Application-centric security is enforced not just through zero-trust architecture and mutual TLS encryption across environments, but also by the fine-grained policy control of application connectivity. That brings network segmentation and isolation, where each network is private to its application as a “Virtual Application Network”.
Another attribute of application-centric overlay connectivity is the application mobility and portability. Applications and services can be moved to any cluster, any network, any site, and cloud without impacting connectivity since policy-based connectivity will automatically re-connect those applications and services to the new environment.
Load balancing and dynamic re-route of application connectivity in “Virtual Applications Networks” provide an enhanced level of application resilience, capable to route around outages in the underlay networks.
What does it mean for IT teams?
IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh enhances collaboration between application and cloud infrastructure teams. It enables infrastructure teams to retain network control and offer network and security endorsed “Virtual Applications Networks’ as simplified and abstracted application connectivity services to the application team. It enables application teams to follow a “shift-left networking” model which allows application developers to establish interconnection with other services and applications in different environments during the development phase without relying on network specialists. This reduces development and deployment time across environments by allowing applications to move to different environments along with their required interconnections.
And operationally (day-2 and beyond) Hybrid Cloud Mesh bridges operational silos by providing application teams and infrastructure teams a common platform to visualize both the application and network layers and quickly diagnose and mitigate application connectivity issues.
What does it mean for technology leaders?
Hybrid Cloud Mesh allows technology leaders to be more agile without building entire teams to support each cloud network environment.
It lowers the total cost of ownership since it reduces the technical and organizational complexity of application connectivity. It enables cloud costs reduction for applications and services and cloud vendor lock-in through optimum location and cloud vendor selection. In addition, the skillset required to support Hybrid Cloud Mesh are easier to find and cheaper compared to traditional networking resources. Network Engineers are still needed to support the underlay, but there's less of a demand on this level of expertise, which will further reduce cost.
Hybrid Cloud Mesh increases the application uptime and mobility with secure application overlays, agnostic to underlying physical networks, that further enhances application resiliency and portability.
And finally, Hybrid Cloud Mesh simplifies troubleshooting with end-to-end app-connectivity observability to optimize application performance.
We at IBM are just continuing on our journey building comprehensive hybrid multi-cloud automation solutions for the enterprise. Hybrid Cloud Mesh is not just a network solution; it’s engineered to be a transformative force that empowers businesses to derive maximum value from modern application architecture, enabling hybrid cloud adoption and revolutionizing how multi-cloud environments are utilized. We hope you join us on the journey.
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