IBM's Red Hat business unit is well-known for its Linux operating system and OpenShift Kubernetes container platforms, but it's also got a strong foothold in the networking field as well.

At its Red Hat Summit 2023 event this week in Boston, the company announced its new Service Interconnect offering that enables organizations to more easily create secure application connections across clusters and clouds. While service mesh technology like Istio is commonly used by vendors to create connectivity inside cloud-native deployments, the new Service Interconnect is taking a different approach. Based on the open-source Skupper project, Red Hat's Service Interconnect is an application layer interconnect technology for secure communications between Kubernetes clusters, public cloud and virtual machines, as well as bare-metal hosts.

In a briefing with press and analysts, Red Hat CTO Chris Wright explained the goals of the new offering. Overall, the goal is to enable cross-cluster and cross-infrastructure application connectivity.

“That's a big challenge for our customers; and we know our customers are building applications that need to be connected,” Wright said.

Red Hat is not a networking vendor, but it does play a strong supporting role in the networking ecosystem overall.

Wright noted that while his company is not necessarily in the business of low-level data center infrastructure networking gear, such as switches and routers, Red Hat's software does integrate and touch all the low-level gear in one way or another.

For example, with its Ansible platform, which got an artificial intelligence (AI) update this week with Ansible Lightspeed, the company is providing tooling to help automate the deployment, configuration and management of IT operations, including networking gear. Red Hat has also built networking capabilities into its OpenShift container and OpenStack infrastructure platforms.

The vendor is also a leader in the Open vSwitch (OVS) virtual switch and Open Virtual Network (OVN) communities that are fundamental to modern data center and cloud networking.

Wright added that telcos are a primary customer target for Red Hat, where the company is helping to provide the operating system to power applications that run on fixed and mobile networks. He noted that telco remains a big focus.

“The world is fundamentally distributed, all applications are distributed and the only thing that connects them back is the network,” Wright said. “So it's always a question of exactly what role we play at different layers in the stack.”