As organizations move to the open hybrid cloud and deploy cloud-native architectures for their modern business applications, new levels of complexity have arisen that impact developer's ability to efficiently build and test their applications. The need for applications to work across multiple cloud properties—with various services running on different clouds, both public and private,  and interconnecting with legacy systems on-prem—creates challenges for establishing this interconnectivity in an efficient and secure manner.

Historically, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and/or explicit firewall rules would be utilized to interconnect these disparate on-prem or cloud networks so applications and services could communicate. This required significant planning followed by configuration from the network and infrastructure teams to provision these interconnections and could take days if not weeks to review and deploy.

For the application developer, this stifled their ability to be agile and quickly spin up applications and services on the best platform for its specific use—subjecting the application developer to the wait times of the infrastructure and networking teams. The result would be delayed development cycles and often a reduction in test coverage of the application and services across the variety of environments it was to be deployed to.

Enter Red Hat Service Interconnect

But what if application developers had the ability to instantiate the connections between clouds or on-prem properties as needed, without having to wait for network or infrastructure teams to engage in lengthy review processes and updated network provisioning? What if developers could, with just a few commands, create the secure connections needed so that their applications and services could connect?

This is what Red Hat Service Interconnect delivers to both infrastructure operators and developers—a mechanism where developers can “self-service” the interconnections they need while the infrastructure operators still maintain the integrity and control required for a secure infrastructure.

What is Red Hat Service Interconnect?

Delivered as a supported offering built from the upstream Skupper.io open source project, Red Hat Service Interconnect enables applications and service connectivity across Red Hat platforms including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift and non-Red Hat environments including Kubernetes clusters, public cloud, virtual machines or bare-metal hosts. 

Using a simple command line interface, interconnections are created in a matter of minutes, avoiding extensive networking planning and configuration, while minimizing the added risk to your organization's security or the user's data.

With Red Hat Service Interconnect, applications and their associated networking are completely portable across different environments without any additional configuration, easing complex migrations and providing benefits such as operational efficiency. 

Red Hat Service Interconnect provides:

  • Dynamic routing, which enables connections to move when applications migrate across properties.The ability to create interconnections across any environment in a matter of minutes enabling increased agility and speed. Red Hat Service Interconnect doesn't require extensive network planning nor provisioning of VPNs combined with complex firewall rules.
  • Interconnections which are agnostic of the environment, IP versions (such as IPv4 and IPv6) and enable portability for both applications and their associated networking configuration. Migrating applications across environments and across the software lifecycle can now be more easily done without having to recreate the required networking. 
  • An straightforward command line interface and Kubernetes Operator that that helps users to configure and manage their interconnections without needingr elevated privileges. 
  • All interconnections between applications use mutual TLS to help protect your organization's infrastructure and data.

Unlike VPN-based solutions delivering cross-platform connectivity, Red Hat Service Interconnect delivers connectivity at the application level—allowing for only a “pinhole” access to be created between networks rather than having to wholly open networks up to one another for communication. Security is a core part of Red Hat Service Interconnect and is realized in a number of ways throughout the implementation of the offering:

  • Simple command line interface: Service Interconnect provides a simple command line interface which can be used without elevated privileges by the development team in order to establish protected connections across environments. 
  • Mutual TLS Encryption: Interconnections created by Service Interconnect use Mutual TLS in order to better prevent unauthorized interconnections. Organizations now can operate flexibly and quickly while maintaining the integrity of their infrastructure and data. 

Red Hat Service Interconnect advantages

Red Hat Service Interconnect provides a number of unique advantages over other solutions for cross-platform interconnectivity:

  • Can be used in combination with Red Hat and non-Red Hat platforms in order to help our customers address hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios. 
  • Provides smart routing to automatically find an optimal path to endpoints without any additional configuration.
  • Allows applications to be more portable between environments due to the ability to avoid lock-in to provider-specific networking. If the application needs to move to a different environment, the connectivity follows along. 
  • Does not need elevated privileges and it can easily be installed by infrastructure admins for their development teams’s use in their local or remote environments.
  • Reduces exposure to security risks by isolating the connection between sites to the components of the application.

With Red Hat Service Interconnect, infrastructure and platform teams can provide their application developers with a more efficient development environment, unblocking them from the delays of rapidly connecting their applications across cloud and on-prem properties, while still maintaining the necessary level of security and control.

Red Hat Service Interconnect also allows for flexibility of development across legacy, container or Kubernetes platforms—giving your developers more options for building, modernizing and deploying your next-generation business applications.

Learn more

For more information on Red Hat Service Interconnect, visit our website or contact us to schedule a discussion on how Red Hat can help you in your application modernization goals.