Hybrid Cloud Mesh

I'm hearing from some people that customers already have a networking technology partner and SDN/SD-WAN is dominated by Juniper/Cisco/etc.

Then, there is also talk of a big trend in modernizing networking around Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters in order to make workloads more flexible/hybrid.

What do you think?

1. OpenShift or any other K8s distribution t is not an overlay networking solution by itself. It is primarily a container orchestration platform, which supports many standard Container Networking Interface drivers. Primarily, the CNI plugin accomplishes pod networking within a cluster.
2. Within the Kube world, inter-cluster networking is very cumbersome, non-standard, and immature.
3. What IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh does is to enable the user operate beyond a cluster, and truly unlink the networking complexities from application deployment. CNI networking should be seen as infra-centric. It does not give anyone application awareness. It is not going to enable use-cases like networking-following-applications, or visibility into application interaction patterns. CNI networking is only for the containerised world, that too intra-cluster. It is not going to support non containerised environments, whereas in real world, most deployments are "hybrid"
4. Also, CNIs can help only in places where there is a containerised environment possible. Mesh helps us connect both containerised AND legacy workloads, all through a uniform interface
5. In short, Mesh supports a variety of environments that include on-prem locations, private clouds, public clouds, managed clusters etc. We see Openshift as one of the environments whose workloads can be made accessible through Mesh

In general, the query can be summarised as "I already have a networking technology partner for me, who is helping me connect workloads through existing means, why do I need Mesh now". This is like asking "why do we need autonomous cars when we can drive them manually"