Red Hat Connectivity Link

Red Hat Connectivity Link 1.4

Multicloud application connectivity and API management

Red Hat OpenShift Documentation Team

Abstract

This guide provides an overview of the main features, technologies, benefits, and user workflows that are available with Red Hat Connectivity Link.

Chapter 1. About Connectivity Link

Red Hat Connectivity Link is a control plane for configuring the Gateway API data plane in OpenShift Container Platform clusters. You can use it to apply authentication, rate limiting, and DNS policies to gateway resources.

1.1. About Red Hat Connectivity Link

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

Apply policies to standard Content from gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io is not included.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 3.3 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 3.3 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

1.2. Supported configurations with Connectivity Link

Connectivity Link must run on a supported combination of OpenShift Container Platform and use the cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift.

To configure observability, use Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh.

Red Hat provides both production and development support for supported configurations and tested integrations according to your subscription agreement.

Important

If you use a configuration that includes OpenShift Container Platform 4.18 or older, you must also use Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh as the Gateway API provider.

1.2.1. Supported OpenShift Container Platform version configurations

Red Hat Connectivity Link	Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform	Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated	Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS	Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift
Version 1.4	4.22, 4.21, 4.20, 4.19	4.22, 4.21, 4.20, 4.19	4.22, 4.21, 4.20, 4.19	4.19
Version 1.3	4.21, 4.20, 4.19, 4.18	4.21, 4.20, 4.19, 4.18	4.21, 4.20, 4.19, 4.18	4.19
Version 1.2	4.20, 4.19, 4.18	4.20, 4.19, 4.18	4.20, 4.19, 4.18	4.17

For Microsoft Azure, see the Content from learn.microsoft.com is not included.Support lifecycle for Azure Red Hat OpenShift 4.

1.2.2. Supported Operators

Red Hat Connectivity Link	Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh	cert-manager Operator for Red Hat OpenShift
Version 1.4	3.2	1.18
Version 1.3	3.2	1.18
Version 1.2	3.1	1.17

1.2.3. Supported cloud providers

All versions of Connectivity Link support the following platforms as backing cloud providers for OpenShift Container Platform:

Amazon Web Services
Google Cloud Platform
Microsoft Azure

For more information, see the documentation for your chosen cloud provider.

1.2.4. Supported cloud DNS providers

For DNS policies, all versions of Connectivity Link support the following cloud DNS providers:

Amazon Route 53
Google Cloud Platform DNS
Microsoft Azure DNS

For more information, see the documentation for your chosen cloud DNS provider.

1.2.5. Supported on-premise DNS providers

You can use CoreDNS can to configure an on-cluster DNS zone. For more information, see This content is not included.Using on-premise DNS with CoreDNS.

1.2.6. Supported data stores for rate limiting

For rate limiting policies, Connectivity Link supports the following Redis-based data stores for rate limit counters in multicluster environments:

Red Hat Connectivity Link	Redis Enterprise or Cloud	Amazon ElastiCache	Dragonfly Community or Cloud
Version 1.4	latest	latest	latest
Version 1.3	latest	latest	latest
Version 1.2	latest	latest	latest

For more information, see the documentation for your chosen Redis-based datastore.

1.2.7. Supported identity access management

For authentication policies, Connectivity Link supports API keys and the following products:

Red Hat Connectivity Link Version	Red Hat build of Keycloak
Version 1.4	Version 26.4
Version 1.3	Version 26.4
Version 1.2	Version 26.4

For more information, see Supported Configurations for Red Hat build of Keycloak.

1.3. Additional resources

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