Chapter 6. Connectivity Link user workflows

Platform engineers use Connectivity Link to set up ingress Gateways on OpenShift clusters in specific regions. They then ensure that all policies are configured identically on all Gateways for consistency.

For example, platform engineers configure DNS policies to ensure that customers in Brazil are routed to the South American data center, and that other customers around the world are routed to the appropriate environment. They also configure TLS, authentication and authorization, and rate limiting policies to ensure that Gateway security, performance, and monitoring conform to the correct standards.

The following diagrams show a high-level overview of the Connectivity Link platform engineer workflow:

Figure 6.1. Connectivity Link platform engineer sets up Gateways

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As a platform engineer, you must start by creating one or more Gateways, if they have not already been created.

Figure 6.2. Connectivity Link platform engineer configures Gateway policies

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You can connect Gateways by creating a DNS policy and configuring a global load balancing strategy. DNS records are reconciled with your cloud DNS provider automatically, whether in a single-cluster or multicluster environment.

You can secure Gateways by using a TLS policy that automatically generates certificate requests for the hostnames specified in your Gateway. This includes support for the main ACME providers such as Let’s Encrypt. You can also set up application security defaults and overrides by using authentication and authorization policies and rate limiting policies.

In addition, you can observe your connectivity and runtime metrics by using Grafana-based dashboards and alerts. For example, this includes metrics for policy compliance and governance, resource consumption, error rates, request latency and throughput, multicluster split, and so on.

Application developers use Connectivity Link to deploy applications and APIs on OpenShift clusters and Gateways that have already been set up by platform engineers. Application developers ensure that applications and APIs are protected by the required authentication and authorization, and configure rate limits on API requests. They also set up application routes and API definitions and publish them to the cluster.

Application developers use Grafana dashboards to view API metrics, such as uptime, requests per second, latency, and errors per minute, to ensure that APIs meet performance and availability benchmarks achieved by other data centers. The following diagram shows a high-level overview of the Connectivity Link application developer workflow:

Figure 6.3. Connectivity Link application developer configures policies for applications and APIs

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As an application developer, you can route to applications from the Gateway, configure protection for your services with root-level authentication, external authorization, and rate limiting. You can also monitor workloads and the status of OpenShift resource metrics and tracing by using Grafana-based observability dashboards and alerts.

Business users such as account managers and application owners use Grafana-based observability dashboards to monitor the status of applications and APIs in data centers in specific regions, and work with customers on specific performance metrics. They view API metrics, such as uptime, requests per second, latency, and errors per minute, to ensure that APIs meet the performance and availability benchmarks that are expected by customers.

Business users also communicate with engineering teams if customers experience any issues that can be resolved by platform engineers or application developers.