IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh and Red Hat Service Interconnect: A new era of app-centric connectivity
21 May 2024
2 min read

To meet customer demands, applications are expected to be performing at their best at all times. Simultaneously, applications need to be flexible and cost effective, and therefore supported by an underlying infrastructure that is equally reliant, performant and secure as the applications themselves.

Easier said than done. According to EMA’s 2024 Network Management Megatrends report (link resides outside ibm.com) only 42% of responding IT professionals would rate their network operations as successful.

In this era of hyper-distributed infrastructure where our users, apps, and data are everywhere, how do businesses establish the order and control needed to consistently deliver high performing applications, on responsive and reliable networks, efficiently and cost-effectively?

When we launched IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh last year, we set out to solve this. We understood that CloudOps and DevOps teams needed a solution where applications could connect to their cloud environments to get to an application-centric posture. IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh was designed to simplify the complexity of automating application connectivity across cloud environments, cloud workloads and applications themselves.

Further, we believe security and agility are critical for app-centric connectivity. And we see that it’s important that cloud and application connectivity work across as many different environments as needed, regardless of cloud, application, network and virtual workload configurations.

With this in mind, we’re pleased to announce the July 18th release of IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh with Red Hat Service Interconnect, which now combines the power of comprehensive application connectivity with the ability to harness a secured overlay to extend the reach of connectivity without having to reconfigure the network.

Enhancing connection between your applications and cloud environments

The new Red Hat Service Interconnect overlay provides IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh users the ability to reach and connect Kubernetes clusters, virtual machines and bare-metal hosts.

It is engineered to eliminate IP layer dependencies, VPN or firewall rules to reduce complexity across large clusters or small edge devices, no VPN or firewall rules to worry about across large clusters or small edge devices.

With security being a critical driver for digital and cloud transformation initiatives, the added protection of infrastructure and data with Red Hat Service Interconnect’s connectivity layer security is important to CloudOps and DevOps teams while automating their application infrastructure.

The management, control and policy plane of IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh aims to improve cost efficiency, uptime and simplistic automation to ensure applications are performing at their best no matter the infrastructure.

To handle peak demands for applications, IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh utilizes network traffic steering from IBM NS1 Connect – giving teams flexibility in how these applications run across the network.

Achieving hybrid by design and true app-centric connectivity

IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh is not just a network solution; it’s engineered to be a transformative force that empowers businesses to derive maximum value from modern application architecture, enabling hybrid cloud adoption and revolutionizing how multi-cloud environments are utilized.

It also seeks to bridge the operational silos between critical IT teams. We see that CloudOps and DevOps teams are burdened with the increased complexity that applications bring, while tasked with building out their hybrid cloud environments and making sure applications are always performing. Our vision is to help empower these teams to automate their infrastructure so they can focus on unleashing the full potential of new and existing applications.

IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh with Red Hat Service Interconnect will be generally available on June 18, 2024.

Ready to learn more about IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh?
Author
Reginald P. Best Program Director, Head of NS1 Product Management