Getting started with Mesh Essentials edition

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New to IBM® Hybrid Cloud Mesh (Mesh)? Read this overview of what you need to do to get access to Mesh, add your infrastructure resources, add your applications, then view your applications and services in Mesh.

CloudOps staff can add infrastructure resources by autodiscovery or manually. DevOps staff can make sure that their applications are deployed in the cloud and check on traffic metrics.

Prerequisites

Get an IBMid on the Create an IBMid page.
Subscribe to IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh on the page.
When you subscribe to Mesh, a tenant is created for you and a user is designated as a tenant administrator. This user has the Admin role and can add users and assign roles and access permissions within their tenant.

Tips:

To access the Mesh console, you must log in with your IBMid. IBM Cloud® user credentials are not accepted.
Resources are not shown in the console until you complete the getting started steps.

Let's get started

To connect your applications, that is, connect your front ends to back ends, follow the steps in this table.

Task	Description
Prepare your application environment	Install the Mesh CLI on your host system. Then, create a cluster and namespace for the front end, deploy the front end, and install an agent in the same namespace. Do the same for the back end. See Preparing your application environment.
(Optional) Add users and roles to Mesh	When you subscribe to Mesh, a tenant is created for you and a user is designated as a tenant administrator. This user can add users and assign roles and access permissions within their tenant.
(Optional) Create resource groups	Resource groups enable you to create groups of resources and grant permission to all the resources in the group, rather than granting many individual permissions. After you create your resource groups, you can create roles that have specific types of access to all the resources in those groups.
Add your infrastructure resources to Mesh	Create a network segment. Then, do one of the following: Add your infrastructure resources automatically Register your secrets in Mesh to enable Mesh to access your cloud on AWS, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), or IBM Cloud. Register credentials for your AWS, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), or IBM Cloud account as a secret in Mesh. After you register the credentials, Mesh can access your cloud. Register your clouds and enable autodiscovery. For more information, see Discovering cloud infrastructure. Add your infrastructure resources manually. For more information, see Registering infrastructure resources by using the Mesh console. Now, you can view your infrastructure resources and select the locations and deployment environments that you want to manage.
Deploy and connect gateways	Do the following: Deploy gateways within your network segment. If you want to use Mesh to connect client applications that run on non-Kubernetes infrastructure to Kubernetes services over the Mesh application network, then you must configure external client access. Create remote connections between the gateways.
Connect your applications	Do the following: Mesh automatically discovers Kubernetes-based applications in the same namespace as the gateway. For VM-based client applications, that is, front end applications, see Connecting to services from external clients. For VM-based services, that is, back end applications, see Connecting to external services. Connect your applications by using policies.
View your applications and services in tables or in a topology view	You can view lists of your applications and services and navigate to view details such as deployments, instances, and connection policies. You can use the topology view to visualize the key details and relationships between your locations, deployment environments, gateways, and associated applications and services. You can also view the application-to-service traffic metrics in the topology view or in a third-party application such as Grafana.