Connect, secure, and observe all of your service endpoints by using Connectivity Link in multicloud and hybrid cloud environments.

Apply policies to standard Gateway API resources in OpenShift Container Platform clusters by using Connectivity Link and remove the need to embed networking code into your applications. This enables an infrastructure-as-code approach to ingress traffic management and protocol support.

You can use OpenShift Service Mesh 3.4 or configure the OpenShift istio controller as the Gateway API provider.

You can use an istio controller by enabling the Gateway API. To enable Gateway API, you must create a GatewayClass object that specifies the openshift.io/gateway-controller/v1 controller name. See "Enable Gateway API for the Ingress Operator" in the Additional resources section for the procedure.

Important

If you want to use Connectivity Link with mTLS enabled, or keep control over your Istio configuration, you must deploy OpenShift Service Mesh 3.4 and apply your own Istio CR and IstioCNI CRs.
User workflows

Connectivity Link supports role-based access control tailored to specific responsibilities, for example:

  • Platform or infrastructure providers

  • Cluster administrators

  • Application developers and API managers

Automatic updates

Connectivity Link consists of the following four Operators bundled into a single catalog:

  • The Connectivity Link Operator manages policy attachment and Gateway API integration.

  • The Authorino Operator handles authentication and authorization.

  • The Limitador Operator manages rate-limiting.

  • The DNS Operator manages multi-cluster DNS.

The Connectivity Link Operator declares the other three Operators as dependencies through Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM). This installation type means that updates are automatic.

Example policy types

Configure Gateway objects with TLS policies for the following uses:

  • Certificate management

  • Authentication

  • Authorization

  • Rate limiting

Integrate DNS policies for the following uses:

  • Multicluster load balancing

  • Health checks

  • Remediation

Observability

Monitor your environment by using dashboards, metrics, tracing, and alerts, for example:

  • Observability dashboards

  • Observability metrics

  • Tracing

  • Alerts

Connectivity Link combines state metrics, component metrics, and standard Envoy metrics to provide template alerts and dashboards.

API management

Use the OpenShift Container Platform web console plugin to manage APIs, for example:

  • API security and governance

  • API-level policies for authentication, authorization, and rate limiting

Additional resources

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