DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh to connect, observe and simplify service-to-service communication of Kubernetes applications on the Red Hat OpenShift 4 Kubernetes platform.

Based on the Istio, Kiali and Jaeger projects and enhanced with Kubernetes Operators, OpenShift Service Mesh is designed to deliver a more efficient, end-to-end developer experience around microservices-based application architectures. This helps to free developer teams from the complex tasks of having to implement bespoke networking services for their applications and business logic.

While microservices present a transformative option for modern, cloud-native applications, effectively developing and using microservices in production can raise new challenges of implementing and managing inter-service communication. This has led to the development of the service mesh, an underlying infrastructure responsible for traffic management, policy enforcement and service identity and security. The OpenShift Service Mesh extends these traffic management features by including service observability and visualization of the mesh topology to enhance the service mesh experience. By integrating service mesh natively into the OpenShift Kubernetes platform, developers can improve their implementation of microservice architectures. Platform operations teams can benefit from the ability to enforce IT policies for service security and communication. Users can benefit from normalized environments across datacenters and the cloud through the use of software defined infrastructure built on open source software.

Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh provides a uniform way to oversee and manage the connections between microservices-based applications by combining key open source projects in a hardened, integrated and supported feature of the OpenShift platform. With OpenShift Service Mesh, customers can benefit from:

- An end-to-end developer-focused experience through unified and optimized underlying technologies (Istio, Kiali and Jaeger). Combining Istio and Kiali for the creation and management of a service mesh with Jaeger for OpenTracing visibility, OpenShift Service Mesh is helping developers to focus on the application services.

- Tracing and measurement via Jaeger, enabling developers to track a request between services with insight into the request process from start to finish.

- Visualization and observability from Kiali, offering an easier way to view the topology of the service mesh and to observe how the services interact.

- Integrated API Gateway when the OpenShift Service Mesh is deployed together with Red Hat 3scale to simplify North-South traffic flow between application endpoints and the service backend.

- "One-click" Service Mesh installation and configuration via the Service Mesh Operator and an Operator Lifecycle Management framework, giving developers the ability to deploy applications into a service mesh more easily. A Service Mesh Operator deploys Istio, Jaeger and Kiali together along with the configuration logic via a single package. This helps to minimize management burdens and automates common tasks such as installation, service maintenance and lifecycle management.

As with the features and components of Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh is backed by Red Hat support, making it a powerful option for production systems in even the most mission-critical roles. Additionally, Red Hat Services are available to help customers of OpenShift Service Mesh with additional technical expertise, strategic advising and analysis.

The Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh Operator will be available through the OpenShift 4 OperatorHub in the coming weeks.