After spending more than 40 hours during the four days of MWC 2024 in Barcelona, and talking to hundreds of different companies of different sizes and different verticals, we came to the conclusion that application connectivity is becoming a problem.
Why?
Application modernization is a big trend and is bringing lots of new features and functionality, but if we want to take full advantage of the hybrid cloud world and run the microservices where it makes more sense, connectivity becomes an issue.
If you are taking the 'stretch cluster' approach where all your containers run in a single cluster, connectivity won't be an issue, but if you want to improve resiliency and not lose all your apps when there is a cluster problem, you will leverage the value of a multi-cluster, multi-cloud approach, where microservices run in multiple clusters located onprem as well as on multiple clouds.
Legacy vs Modern Applications
And connecting those microservices together is a problem, because legacy/monolithic applications can connect easily among them using IP addresses, i.e. connect the frontend server to the backend server using this IP and this port. But modern applications programmed by developers don't care about IPs, they care about namespaces, services, tag, labels...
Legacy vs Modern Connectivity Paradigm
And on this new paradigm it is still possible to connect these microservices together using IP networks (VPNs, firewalls, routers, BGP...) but that means that DevOps teams need to rely on NetOps/CloudOps to provide the connectivity, and we all know that this process can take time (weeks...).
Example of Services Exposed
Solve the Problem
How can we empower DevOps to create their connectivity as part of their CI/CD pipelines and reduce the time it takes to deploy applications?
Hybrid Cloud Mesh provides this 'Connectivity as a Service' approach allowing DevOps to create them connectivity on demand, but leaving the infrastructure control to the NetOps/CloudOps. Each team will still manage their domain (NetOps manages the infrastructure, DevOps the applications) but in a much more efficient way, reducing the time to deploy applications by weeks.
Hybrid Cloud Mesh Topology View