Release Notes for Red Hat Connectivity Link 0.7 Developer Preview

Updated -

Red Hat Connectivity Link is a modular and flexible solution for application connectivity and API management in hybrid and multicloud environments, and which is targeted at specific user roles. The core application connectivity features provided by Connectivity Link are based on the Kuadrant community project, while the API development features integrate with the Apicurio Studio community project.

Connectivity Link provides a multicluster control plane for configuring and deploying ingress gateways based on the Kubernetes Gateway API 1.0 standard. This control plane provides Kubernetes-native APIs for platform engineers to configure DNS policies for global load balancing, endpoint health checks and remediation, along with TLS policies for certificate management. Connectivity Link also provides powerful data plane policies for application developers to secure and protect gateways with essential features such as authentication, authorization, and rate limiting.

Connectivity Link currently supports Istio as the Gateway API provider on OpenShift, which you can install by using the Sail Operator Developer Preview.

Note: Red Hat Connectivity Link 0.7 is available as a Developer Preview prerelease to gather feedback from early adopters on new features in development. For more details, see Developer Preview Support Scope.

Application connectivity

Connectivity Link provides the following application connectivity features for platform engineers:

  • DNS routing and global load balancing
  • DNSPolicy management
    • Simple and advanced DNS strategies
    • Endpoint health checks
  • TLSPolicy management
    • ACME integration
    • Automatic certificate generation for gateways
  • Integration with cloud service providers (AWS and GCP)
  • Integration with OpenShift and other Red Hat products

API management

Connectivity Link provides the following API management features for application developers:

  • Composable API management
  • API Designer editor based on Apicurio Studio
  • Integration with Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring
  • API lifecycle management
  • Rate limiting
  • Analytics
    • Requests per minute
    • Average and max latency
    • Errors per minute
    • API usage growth
  • Security and access
    • API keys/tokens
    • Validation of truth
    • Audit trail and logging

The primary target user roles for Red Hat Connectivity Link are as follows:

Platform engineer

Platform engineers use Connectivity Link to set up OpenShift clusters in specific regions, ensure that cluster policies are configured identically for consistency, and test gateway endpoints to verify that policies and routes are configured correctly. For example, they ensure that customers in Brazil are routed to a South American datacenter, and other customers around the world are routed to the appropriate environment. Platform engineers also ensure that performance and monitoring conform to the correct standards.

Application developer

Application developers use Connectivity Link to deploy applications and APIs on OpenShift clusters set up by platform developers. Application developers ensure that APIs are protected by authentication/authorization and configure rate limits on API requests. They set up routes and specifications for APIs and publish them to the cluster. They also use Grafana to view API metrics, such as uptime, requests per min, latency, and errors per min, to ensure that APIs meet performance and availability benchmarks achieved by other datacenters.

Business user

Business users such as account managers use Connectivity Link to monitor the status of datacenters in specific regions, liaise with customers on performance metrics, and communicate with engineering teams if customers experience issues that need to be corrected by platform engineers or application developers.

To get started with using Connectivity Link to deploy and manage single-cluster and multicluster gateways and APIs, see the latest community documentation:

Note: The Kuadrant 0.7 user documentation is no longer published. The source files are still available in the following GitHub repositories:

For more information, see the Kuadrant or Apicurio Studio documentation.

Known issues

Red Hat Connectivity Link 0.7 Developer Preview includes the following known issues:

Kuadrant Operator

  • Kuadrant Operator-605: Reconciliation loop for two AuthPolicy/RateLimitPolicy targeting the same HTTPRoute.
  • Kuadrant Operator-589: Order of listeners in a Gateway might cause DNSPolicy error.
  • Kuadrant Operator-572: TLSPolicy is currently missing an Enforced condition to reflect the state of policy enforcement.
  • Kuadrant Operator-566: Limitations for number of rules included in AuthPolicy.
  • Kuadrant Operator-559: Duplicate metrics in multicluster setup. When remote writing metrics to a hub cluster, duplicate metrics might display in dashboards and might lead to many-to-many errors. There is a plan for a clearer representation of how duplicate metrics are interconnected across clusters.
  • Kuadrant Operator-547: Limitations for AuthPolicy and RateLimitPolicy on multiple routes with an identical host name.

DNS Operator

  • DNS Operator-98: Simple DNSPolicy strategy is limited to IPAddresses in multiple clusters.
  • DNS Operator-91: HealthChecks are limited to IPAddresses and do not support hostname addresses.
  • DNS Operator-82: ManagedZone changes do not trigger changes in DNS records.
  • DNS Operator-61: Private AWS-hosted zones are not supported.

For more details on open issues, see the appropriate Kuadrant repository or the Apicurio Studio repository in GitHub.

Providing feedback

While Red Hat Connectivity Link is experimental and will evolve significantly over the coming weeks and months, we appreciate any and all feedback on this new direction. Community members can provide feedback by creating issues in the appropriate repository in GitHub. For more details, see the Kuadrant Contributor's Guide or the Apicurio Studio GitHub repository.

For Red Hat customers, we encourage you to raise questions and provide feedback through your account teams, and we would be happy to arrange meetings to discuss Connectivity Link and our future strategies. You can also ask questions and provide feedback directly by using the Connectivity Link contact form or by emailing rhcl-contactus@redhat.com.

Note: As a Developer Preview prerelease, we are not accepting support cases for Connectivity Link at this time. For more details, see Developer Preview Support Scope.

What comes next?

Red Hat Connectivity Link will evolve significantly over the coming weeks and months. We will continue to make contributions to the Kuadrant and Apicurio communities to improve the OpenShift experience while creating a productization pipeline and documentation for a General Availability release.

While our timelines are subject to change, we are aiming for a fully supported release by the end of 2024.

Further information

For more details, see the following resources:

Comments