Solo.io, the reference in Cloud-Native Application Networking

With the recent IT Press Tour in California dedicated to Kubernetes, we had the opportunity to meet Solo.io, the fast growing leader in cloud-native application networking. The company, based in Cambridge, MA, was founded by Idit Levine in September 2017 and raised so far $171.5 million.

Enterprises wishing to modernize and scale their business adopt distributed application environments based on micro services orchestrated by Kubernetes. This radical change in their IT architecture introduces new challenges at scale due to the nature of the massive scalability. We all understand that "good" scalability delivers better performance to sustain high number of transactions but it has to be secure, automatic, agile with cost optimization and control in mind. Thus application connectivity and integration require strong API gateway and networking as tons of services, with some maturity differences, need to be coupled together. Solo.io fits perfectly in that production environment with its Service Mesh and API Platform.

I understand that Solo.io is the micro services glue leveraging Envoy and Istio acting respectively as data and control plane. Solo.io has originally developed the API gateway GlooEdge and the Service Mesh GlooMesh coupling them with GlooNetwork with GlooPortal to form GlooPlatorm. What a program. But Cloud-Native 2.0 has shaken the landscape and introduced some new challenges around serverless, micro services across multi-clusters, service mesh zero-trust, observability, security, GitOps and API management again.

To address these new challenges, Solo.io has launched Ambient Mesh a few months ago. It is an open source contribution to the Istio project, Solo.io and Google being the lead contributors to the project, with 3 main goals in mind cost reduction, operations simplification and performance improvement. But one key element is the expansion of the flexibility of Istio. Ambient Mesh changes the architecture with 1 proxy per node in Kubernetes cluster instead of 1 proxy per pod. In that case, applications and the Service Mesh are fully independent, still connected to the Istio control plane. This implementation delivers fastest traffic across containers between nodes. Built on istio, Solo.io has updated GlooMesh to provide a multi-cluster control plane approach. 

Clearly Solo.io leads the pack in the Service Mesh domain for micro services and Kubernetes. Next KubeCon in Amsterdam mid April will be definitely interesting.