We are excited to announce General Availability (GA) of the Tetrate Service Bridge. Tetrate is on a mission to take the complexity of application networking and make it simple for application developers and operators. And today marks an important milestone on our path.
I’m excited to announce that Tetrate has raised $40M in Series B financing, led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from Scale Venture Partners, NTTVC, and previous investors, Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital, 8VC, and Samsung NEXT. I would like to thank my colleagues (aka Tetrands), investors, customers, partners, and friends for their continued support.
The funding will allow us to expand our go-to-market operations globally and double down on engineering to further support our customers in building their connectivity fabric with Tetrate Service Bridge, the only hybrid cloud application networking platform. It will also help us bring Tetrate Cloud, a new SaaS offering to market: a fully managed Istio based service mesh platform to enable “one experience, any cloud.”
As code gets signed off by a developer, it goes to the infrastructure teams that deploy it in the dev/test environment and then validate it via a number of tests. The developer’s skill set usually doesn’t include knowledge of Kubernetes, service mesh parameters, or Ingress gateways. Beyond knowledge, there is usually enterprise grade separation of roles: the developer shouldn’t have access to the network configuration, unnecessary monitoring tools, and certainly not security objects such as certificates.
The Istio service mesh comes with its own ingress, but we see customers with requirements to use a non-Istio ingress all the time. Previously, we’ve covered integrating NGINX with Istio. Recently we’ve been working with customers that are using Traefik ingress. With some slight adjustments to the approach we suggested previously, we at Tetrate learned how to implement Traefik as the ingress gateway to your Istio Service Mesh. This article will show you how.
On February 9, Istio announced the release of Istio 1.9. In this release, we can see the wider adoption of VMs into the service mesh, and even better VM support, cert issuance to VMs, and health checking for the workload entry. Istio’s latest releases, 1.7 and 1.8, made a lot of progress toward making VMs first-class workloads in the mesh, and cert issuance has been the final gap to close.
Istio is one of the most popular and fast-growing open source projects in the cloud native world; while this growth speaks volumes about the value users get from Istio, ease of getting started with and it’s rapid release cadence can be a challenge for many users. Combine that with managing several different versions of Istio clusters at the same time, manually configuring CA certificates for cloud platforms etc – it could get really daunting pretty quickly.
Apache SkyWalking– the APM tool for distributed systems– has historically focused on providing observability around tracing and metrics, but service performance is often affected by the host. The newest release, SkyWalking 8.4.0, introduces a new feature for monitoring virtual machines. Users can easily detect possible problems from the dashboard– for example, when CPU usage is overloaded, when there’s not enough memory or disk space, or when the network status is unhealthy, etc.
In an upcoming National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) special publication I’ve co-authored with NIST’s Ramaswamy Chandramouli, we’ll be presenting recommendations around safely and securely offloading authentication and authorization from application code to a service mesh.
You may have heard that DNS functionality was added in Istio 1.8, but you might not have thought about the impact it has. It solves some key issues that exist within Istio and allows you to expand your mesh architecture to include multiple clusters and virtual machines. An excellent explanation of the features can be found on the Istio website. In short, it enables seamless integration across multiple clusters and Virtual Machines. In this article, we’ll test out the new features and hopefully explain more about what is happening under the hood.
To give you the latest on the Istio service mesh, Tetrate hosted a live Ask Me Anything about Istio webinar on Dec. 16, 2021, with Istio engineers Zack Butcher, Weston Carlson, and Vikas Choudhary; Zack Butcher is an Istio contributor and member of its steering committee. These were our top takeaways.
