Connecting and Securing Services for Hybrid and Multi Cloud Kubernetes

The challenges of securing and governing communication between services running in multiple clusters or different infrastructure can be addressed through the use of service mesh and gateway API solutions in a distributed, heterogeneous environment.

• The shift from data centers on premises to cloud and multi-cloud and hybrid environment has created new challenges in securing and governing communication between services
• Service mesh and gateway API solutions provide a way to address these challenges by offering a shared trust anchor, identity framework, and policies for selective communication
• Examples of service mesh solutions include Linker D and Istio, while Kubernetes Gateway API offers a portable solution for multi-cluster communication

In a finance sector setting, the use of service mesh technology based on Linker D was found to be a feasible solution for monitoring and securing communication between services running in multiple clusters and infrastructure. The shared trust anchor and identity framework allowed for selective communication and prevented customer requests from reaching the wrong clusters.

Kubernetes has become the lingua franca for cloud native applications. It has been a revolution since its first release, in 2015, filling the gap in the IT industry for container orchestration and improving the efficiency in software development, experiencing exponential adoption and growth. Long gone are those days that Kubernetes was used only in the Cloud, and it has progressively extended to many areas like the edge and on premises data centers. However, due to rapid adoption, its implementation inside the organizations may not be planned holistically, with different teams implementing different Kubernetes clusters leading to inconsistencies that are operationally difficult to manage. This situation presents a new challenge when these ops teams have to collaborate: How can they connect their Services? How do they communicate their workloads? How do they secure these communications? Multi cloud and hybrid cloud are real problems, in this panel of architects and practitioners, we explore cross-cloud connectivity challenges and share insights on how to solve infrastructure performance, implement golden signals to monitor the disparate cloud environments.