After months in preview, IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh is now generally available (GA) , providing new multicloud networking capabilities for organizations.

IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh was first announced as an early access preview in May and the technology has been steadily improved and expanded in the months since. The technology is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering designed to provide simplified, secured application-centric connectivity across heterogeneous cloud environments. IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh establishes connectivity based on application endpoints rather than underlying physical networks. This allows seamless deployment of workloads across data centers, private clouds and public clouds.

Among the new features in the GA release are added DNS capabilities and a deeper integration with Red Hat. Over the last several months of early access, a number of organizations have been able to run the service and, according to IBM, have provided positive feedback.

"It turns out that enterprises face exhausting challenges in connecting their applications, data sources and users in and between cloud providers, and our focus on simplicity in providing a drag-and-drop experience to connect applications together hits home," Andrew Coward, GM of Software Defined Networking at IBM, told SDxCentral.

Meshing it all together to improve DNS and management

Among the enhanced capabilities in the GA release is the Mesh Manager.

Coward said that Mesh Manager provides a centralized management and policy plane with observability. The feature also integrates with Red Hat Service Interconnect gateways to simplify application connectivity and security across platforms, clusters and clouds.

"We’ve applied IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh to manage and integrate with Red Hat Service Interconnect to provide a GUI and managed experience for the data-plane to provide Layer 7 application-level connectivity at a namespace level," Coward said.

IBM is also adding support for its NS1 Connect technology which was first announced in September. NS1 is a managed DNS and traffic optimization vendor that was acquired by IBM earlier this year.

Coward said that NS1 Connect helps companies connect their end users with their cloud applications, while IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh is designed to facilitate automation for communication and workload placement of company applications.

"The two products working in concert help companies achieve success with their application availability and performance by enabling complete end to end automation for customers," he said.

The GA release is only the 'beginning of the journey' according to Coward with more innovations on the roadmap to come.

"It’s important to remember that IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh is not just a network solution; it’s engineered to make it as easy as possible to deploy applications across a hybrid-cloud infrastructure," Coward said. "So our work is cut out to include more and varied cloud providers, overlays and applications into the service."