The story behind this workshop

travelzcorp

In this workshop we will follow the story of Travelz Corp, a fictitious global travel services company that is modernizing its application infrastructure. As part of this transformation, Travelz Corp has begun migrating applications to the cloud.

Architecture overview

Here is a high-level view of the Travelz Corp application architecture.

hl arch

  • The Travelz Corp web portal and core services have been migrated and deployed on OpenShift, while the database remains on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

  • The core services of Travelz Corp are present in the travel-agency namespace.

    • The hotels, cars, flights and insurances services connect with the travel-db for the data, and gets the offers to be applied from the discounts service

    • The travels service serves as the REST API to the web portal

The team is currently working towards establishing the necessary connectivity between the applications.

However, they faces several challenges typical of a hybrid cloud environment:

  • Secure connectivity between cloud and on-premises systems: During the transition, some critical databases remain on-premises. Travelz Corp needs to securely connect its new cloud-based services to the on-premises database without exposing sensitive data.

  • Granular access control in a distributed environment: With a distributed microservices architecture, controlling who can access what, and under which conditions, is increasingly complex. The company requires fine-grained, policy-driven service-to-service access controls.

  • Secure access for third-party partners: Core services must be accessible to trusted third-party partners. Travelz Corp needs to expose these services securely, while protecting them from unauthorized access or misuse.

Throughout this workshop, you will play the role of a platform engineer at Travelz Corp, and occasionally that of a developer, and work through these challenges using Red Hat’s connectivity solutions.

Workshop Modules

This workshop is divided into 3 logical sections which provide a guided walkthrough shadowing Travelz Corp’s journey

modules

  • Module 1: Explore how Red Hat Service Interconnect allows the core services on OpenShift to communicate with the on-prem database (on RHEL) seamlessly thereby enabling app connectivity across on-prem and cloud.

  • Module 2: Learn how to manage microservices with Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh through fine-grained access control between services, east-west* traffic management, complex deployment strategies and observability.

  • Module 3: Learn how Red Hat Connectivity Link through rich policy APIs helps you to manage and secure north-south* traffic flow and secure access to core services from third-party partners.

* In application connectivity, east-west traffic refers to data flow between internal components/microservices, and north-south traffic refers to data flow between internal systems and external clients.

Workshop environment

This is a fully guided workshop. All necessary links, credentials, access details, and configurations are provided exactly when and where they are needed. No prior setup is required (ツ)

  • You will be working on a Single Node OpenShift (SNO) cluster deployed on AWS, and a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine.

  • The workshop activities are performed using the OpenShift console and the integrated terminals on the right-hand side.

  • Several components have been preconfigured to ensure this workshop can be completed within a short timeframe. Each of these components will be explained as you progress through the workshop.

Lab instructions and commands

  • Throughout the lab you will see instructions as shown below. You can click the clipboard icon clipboard to copy and execute the command on the upper or lower terminal as directed by the instructions.

    echo 'This is a shell command you should execute in the terminal.
You can copy the command with the clipboard icon on the right'

  • You can adjust the width of the instructions and the right-side terminals windows with the resize grab handles.

    grab handles

  • Most images, particularly large screenshots, when clicked will open in a full screen. If the details aren’t clear in an image, click to fullscreen.

The Travelz Corp application used in this workshop is based on the Kiali Travel Demo Tutorial