Red Hat announces the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh

Last week, the team at Red Hat, a provider of enterprise open source solutions announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh for connecting, managing, observing and simplifying service-to-service communication of Kubernetes applications on Red Hat OpenShift 4.

The OpenShift Service Mesh is based on Istio, Kiali and Jaeger projects and is designed to deliver end-to-end developer experience around microservices-based application architectures. It manages the network connections between the containerized applications and decentralized applications. And eases the complex tasks of implementing bespoke networking services for applications and business logic.

Larry Carvalho, research director, IDC said in a statement to Business Wire, “Service mesh is the next big area of disruption for containers in the enterprise because of the complexity and scale of managing interactions with interconnected microservices. Developers seeking to leverage Service Mesh to accelerate refactoring applications using microservices will find Red Hat’s experience in hybrid cloud and Kubernetes a reliable partner with the Service Mesh solution."

Developers can now improve the implementation of microservice architectures by natively integrating service mesh into the OpenShift Kubernetes platform. The OpenShift Service Mesh improves traffic management by including service observability and visualization of the mesh topology.

Ashesh Badani, Red Hat's senior VP of Cloud Platforms, said in a statement, "The addition of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh allows us to further enable developers to be more productive on the industry's most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform by helping to remove the burdens of network connectivity and management from their jobs and allowing them to focus on building the next-generation of business applications."

Features of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh

Tracing

OpenShift Service Mesh features tracing that uses Jaeger which is an open, distributed tracing system. Tracing helps developers in tracking a request between services. Tracing also helps in providing an insight into the request process right from the start till the end.

Visualization and observability

This Service Mesh also provides an easier way to view its topology and observe how the services interact. Visualization helps in understanding how the services are managed and how the traffic is flowing in near-real time which helps in easier management and troubleshooting.

Service Mesh installation and configuration

OpenShift Service Mesh features “One-click” Service Mesh installation and configuration with the help of Service Mesh Operator and an Operator Lifecycle Management framework. The developers can deploy applications into a service mesh more easily. A Service Mesh Operator deploys Istio, Jaeger and Kiali together minimizes management burdens and automates tasks such as installation, service maintenance as well as lifecycle management.