RH ACM offers the ability to create plugins (https://open-cluster-management.io/docs/concepts/add-on-extensibility/addon/) to extend its functionality. This provides an opportunity for OpenShift Service Mesh to better leverage ACM for deploying and managing service meshes across multiple clusters.

Configuring and managing a service mesh (or multiple meshes in the case of federation) can be challenging due to the need to configure Istio across multiple clusters. This becomes more complicated when common integrations are considered - Kiali, metrics, tracing, cert-manager, etc. Note that ACM provides supports for additional components not included with OCP, including multi-cluster observability infrastructure. This could also include use cases that involve Submariner.

This epic is to investigate how an ACM plugin may help with managing service mesh in the context of multiple clusters, and could include creating a proposal document or prototypes. It is very high-level right now, and will need refinement.

Why is this important?

RH ACM is Red Hat's solution for multi-cluster management, and is sold as part of OpenShift Platform Plus (an upsell), thus providing a better experience with this higher level platform - particularly for multi-cluster use cases, has the potential to increase OPP usage, and thus increase revenue for Red Hat (over a basic OCP subscription).

Note: This has been prototyped in the past: https://github.com/stolostron/multicluster-mesh-addon, but that was 3 years ago. Both OSSM and ACM have changed significantly since then, thus, that PoC may not be that applicable.