Red Hat’s long-simmering Service Mesh platform is now available as part of the vendor’s latest Kubernetes-reliant OpenShift 4.2 update. However, underpinnings of that service mesh platform and Red Hat’s serverless work could complicate the vendor’s open source focus.
The vendor’s Service Mesh platform is one of the more prominent aspects of the latest OpenShift update. It handles service-to-service communication of Kubernetes-orchestrated applications running on Red Hat’s OpenShift 4 platform. It also includes service observability and visualization of the mesh topology that allows an IT organization to enforce service security and communication policies across data centers and the cloud.
Brian Harrington, principal product manager at Red Hat, explained in an email to SDxCentral that the Service Mesh is based on the Istio, Kiali, and Jaeger projects. It’s packaged and distributed as an Operator and is integrated with the Operator Lifecycle Management in OpenShift to help manage upgrades.
Red Hat’s Operator Framework came courtesy of its $250 million acquisition of CoreOS in early 2018. That framework is basically a controller that runs Kubernetes for a particular application. It does this by using the Kubernetes API to handle the creation and management of application instances. Within OpenShift, Operators allow for on-demand provisioning of application services and provide build-and-deploy automation for containerized applications.
Harrington explained that while there are numerous service mesh platforms on the market, Red Hat’s focus on the Operator model was part of the reason it developed its Service Mesh product.
“In this work, we especially found the need to help developers address the setup, traffic flow, and lifecycle management of these pieces in an easier way, which is how we focused on packaging this up on the OpenShift platform enabled by Kubernetes Operators,” he explained.
The latest update also includes a “technology preview” of Red Hat’s OpenShift Serverless product, which is based on the Knative platform. This allows users more control over the management of their running applications by being able to scale them down to zero when not in use.
Istio, Knative Challenges
IBM, which recently closed on its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, was one of the initial backers of Istio alongside Google and Lyft. Red Hat was also one of the founding developers of the Knative platform that launched last year.
The reliance on Istio and Knative comes at an interesting time for both of those platforms. Recent reports have noted that Google, which has been a key contributor to both platforms, was not interested in donating those projects into a neutral-host community like it did with the initial Kubernetes code into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
“Since the start of the Knative project, there have been questions about whether Knative would be donated to a foundation, such as CNCF,” Donna Malayeri, a Google project manager, wrote to the Knative community. “Google leadership has considered this, and has decided not to donate Knative to any foundation for the foreseeable future.”
Joe Beda, who was one of the developers at Google that created the pre-cursor to Kubernetes, noted on Twitter that a similar call was made for Istio.
Red Hat, which has been a bellwether in terms of companies being able to make a business out of open source software, was critical of the move.
“Given the closeness of Knative and Kubernetes, and similarly, with Istio and Kubernetes, a neutral home would continue to make sense,” Harrington wrote. “But more important than a foundation home is open and neutral governance to support a diverse community. We hope to see positive next steps.”
The vendor is far from the only one relying on those two platforms to power their service mesh and serverless activities. Citrix, for instance, recently linked the Istio control plane service mesh to its ADC platform to more tightly secure and optimize traffic with a microservices-based application environment. Knative has seen a more measured adoption curve, though some analysts expect it to become a de facto standard at some point.
Red Hat OpenShift Importance
OpenShift is Red Hat’s open source container platform that uses Kubernetes to support the deployment of containers in a multi-cloud environment. It acts as a management layer for container deployments. The vendor launched a major 4.0 update in May.
It’s also an increasingly important part of the vendor’s operations. In fact, IBM cited OpenShift as being a key draw for the Red Hat purchase.
IHS Markit recently noted that Red Hat was a “market leader” in the container software space, holding 44% market share of segment revenue. Vladimir Galabov, principal analyst at IHS Markit, singled out the CoreOS acquisition as one of the key contributors to that position.