VMware to Showcase NSX Service Mesh with Enterprise PKS at KubeCon EMEA

Go Beyond Microservices with NSX Service Mesh

Based on Istio and Envoy, VMware NSX Service Mesh provides discovery, visibility, control, and security of end-to-end transactions for cloud native applications. Announced at KubeCon NA 2018, NSX Service Mesh is currently in private Beta and interested users may sign up here.

The design for NSX Service Mesh extends beyond microservices to include end-users accessing applications, data stores, and sensitive data elements. NSX Service Mesh also introduces federation for containerized applications running on multiple VMware Kubernetes environments, across on-premises and public clouds. This enables improved operations, security, and visibility for containerized applications running on clusters across multiple on-premises and public clouds – with centrally defined and managed configuration, visuals, and policies.

Enterprises can leverage a number of different capabilities including:

• Traffic management
• mTLS encryption
• Application SLO policies and resiliency controls
• Progressive roll outs
• Automated remediation workflows

Achieve Operational Consistency with Federated Service Mesh

At Google Cloud Next, VMware and Google demonstrated how a hybrid cloud solution can use a federated service mesh across Kubernetes clusters on VMware Enterprise PKS and GKE. This highlighted one example deployment for how enterprise teams can achieve consistent operations and security for cloud native applications and data.

To learn Continue reading

At VMworld, Get An Inside Look at a Modern Bank. Learn How Wells Fargo and Other Top Brands Reduce Risk While Fostering Innovation.

This blog was co-authored by Jared Ruckle and Jonathan Morin.

VMworld is one of the seminal weeks in enterprise IT. You gather with your peers to learn and discuss the challenges of the day. And what are those challenges? Three stand out:

1. Rising consumer expectations. Your customers expect to interact with your brand on their terms. Self-service, mobility, and speed are table stakes. If you don’t deliver a responsive and engaging user experience, you’re irrelevant.
2. Increased competition from startups and incumbents. Your competitors aren’t only your peers in the FORTUNE 500. Startups all over the world are looking to take your market share.
3. Constantly evolving security threats from every direction. Speaking of table stakes: security. In an era where attacks can be launched for pennies – by anyone, from anywhere – you have take a different approach to InfoSec. You need to move faster. Speed and velocity aren’t just for development teams. It’s a crucial for a modern InfoSec mindset too.

Sound familiar? It should if you’re an IT leader. No matter where you are on your journey to get better at software, it’s always fun to learn from others. We want to highlight a few sessions Continue reading

NSX Cloud: A New and Improved Model for Multi-cloud Networking and Security

Remember the headlines years ago, asking what would win: public cloud or private cloud? Or hybrid cloud? And everyone had different definitions for each? Of course, as it often is with technology trends, our “or” questions have “and” answers. Let’s imagine current day, where you might see one group running an application on-premises with absolutely zero plans for it to go anywhere. In a far-away land, several desks or cubes away, some savvy developers are building a new innovation – it could be a new service type, a new app, a new feature on a website – directly in AWS. A few desks further, and someone indeed may believe that AWS app belongs back on premises. Finally, in the same organization, an IT group is looking at how Microsoft Azure is offering a compelling alternative to hosting an app they’re just not interested in maintaining anymore.

This is just one example of a potential multi-cloud scenario. Each organization’s specific needs are different, yet this array of parallel cloud uses is not a foreign one to many organizations. In fact, in this year’s “State of the Cloud” report, RightScale found that organizations use five clouds on average.

At Continue reading

Ready for Take-Off with Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, and vSphere

A complex and diverse world

Singapore. Etihad. Wow. I always found it impressive when airlines were able to build a business and a brand without a significant domestic customer base to start off from. They instead focus on the global market, which is much more challenging. There is a competitive landscape of many players. There is the complexity of interconnecting a world of disparate lands and diverse customer cultures and preferences. An impressive feat.

The world of networking is becoming quite similar. From private, hybrid, and public cloud models, to increased use of SaaS, to the way SaaS and other apps are built using microservices architectures and containers, the landscape of islands to connect in an inherently secure and automated fashion is increasingly diverse and complex.

An app built to demonstrate this diversity

If the airline to networking analogy is lost on you, or you think it’s too much of a stretch, let me pull up the second reason I used planes in my symbolism. My brilliant colleague Yves Fauser built an app to demonstrate how NSX is connecting and securing this variety of new app frameworks, and it happens to be a “plane spotter” app. You may have already Continue reading

VMware NSX for vSphere 6.4 Eases Operations, Improves Application Security with Context

Summary: Generally available today, VMware NSX for vSphere 6.4 raises the bar for application security and planning, and introduces context-aware micro-segmentation

For those working in security, thinking and talking about the cyber threats in the world is a constant, a necessary evil. So, for a moment, let’s summon a better time to our memory. Remember when breaches didn’t keep us up at night? The threat of a breach didn’t hang over our heads with an associated cost of millions of dollars and the privacy of our users. In fact, it did, but they weren’t frequent or public enough to cause the awakening that they do today. We put up a wall at the perimeter to keep the bad guys out, and prayed.

OK, back to modern times. Today, we know the story is much different, for better and for worse. Breaches are more prevalent, but our defenses are more sophisticated and more importantly, they’re continuously evolving (just like the breaches). One major piece of this newer defense picture is micro-segmentation. With micro-segmentation, security policies traditionally only enforced at the perimeter are now brought down to the application. Micro-segmentation has gained massive traction and entered the mainstream, with most cloud Continue reading

NSX-Powered Credit Union Shifts Focus to Speed and Innovation

Personal banking sure isn’t what it used to be. Thankfully.

When is the last time you went to a bank? My trips are so infrequent that I actually enjoy the experience as a change of pace. That’s because normally, I get to transfer money or deposit a check not only online, but from my phone. And things in the banking sector aren’t slowing down, they’re speeding up, as new digital upstarts create competition and a pressure to innovate and make customers’ lives easier.

Still, not too long ago, the banking industry was still feeling the shockwaves of the financial crisis. Investments across the industry were tight, meaning more had to be done with less – a story many of us who have had roles in IT can relate to. So when Amy Hysell took on the role of CIO at the Arizona Federal Credit Union (AZFCU), she decided to take a fresh approach. To compete in this fast-moving industry, she stepped back and took a look at on how to enable speed and innovation, while keeping security as the top priority, and also without sacrificing cost efficiency.

Fast forward to today, and a peek at some of AZFCU’s services quickly Continue reading

3 Ways Organizations Use NSX for Application Continuity

Five example customers using NSX to enable application continuity for their business

No one looks forward to data center outages. Not the business leaders who fear revenue loss from applications being down, nor the heroic IT admin whose pager is going off at 3:00 AM. Therefore many critical data centers have a sister location and some form of a disaster recovery plan, should something go awry. At the same time, infrastructure teams are under pressure to be more agile and more responsive to the business, across the board, while still lowering costs and making the most out of what they already have. So what exactly happens in the case of a disaster?

The Ponemon Institute reports the average cost of a data center outage to be $740,357, but with massive variance – some known examples going up to $150 million. As businesses move to accelerate to keep up with changes in their industry, each minute lost to downtime can have an impact not only on company resources but also on brand reputation. This is why enabling business continuity or application continuity in a manner that doesn’t require new infrastructure is vital. VMware NSX can offer companies a competitive edge through networking and security Continue reading