Both the Service Mesh Performance (SMP) projects joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) earlier this month at the Sandbox level. Meshery is a multiservice mesh management plane offering lifecycle, configuration, and performance management of service meshes and their workloads, while SMP is a standard for capturing and characterizing the details of infrastructure capacity, service mesh configuration, and workload metadata. When the projects first applied in April for inclusion, the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) had one clarifying question for them: should they be combined with or aligned in some manner with the Lee Calcote, founder of verifies that, in fact, it is a certain kind of a service mesh,” said Calcote. “So all in one Continue reading
Network connections can be likened to attending an amusement park, where Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), serves as the ticket to enter the park and the domain name system (DNS) is the map around the park. Network management and security provider Infoblox made a name for itself by collapsing those two core pieces into a single platform for enterprises to be able to control where IP addresses are assigned and how they manage network creation and movement. “They control their own DNS so that they can have better control over their traffic,” explained Infoblox: How DDI Can Help Solve Network Security and Management Ills Also available on Google Podcasts, PlayerFM, Spotify, TuneIn Infoblox’s name for this unified service is DDI, which is
Richard MacManus Richard is senior editor at The New Stack and writes a weekly column about web and application development trends. Previously he founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003 and built it into one of the world’s most influential technology news and analysis sites. When Twitter began imposing Diaspora — a kind of decentralized Facebook — was founded by four New York students. Later, in 2017, a federated social network named surge of popularity. Now, in 2021, there is a growing underground project called Manyverse and Dominic Tarr, a New Zealander who lived on a boat and had sporadic internet coverage. Tarr’s lifestyle (which, Continue reading
Adam Sandor Adam is a solution architect at Styra, helping companies to adopt OPA and Styra DAS. He has been working in the cloud native space for the past six years, focusing on Kubernetes adoption and software delivery. In his free time, Adam is a dedicated DCS World pilot and happy cyclist roaming the cycle paths of the Netherlands. Cloud native tooling for authorization is an emerging trend poised to revolutionize the way we approach this oft-neglected part of our applications. Styra DAS offer. When services are connected using the Istio service mesh, all those sidecar proxies running Envoy are great places to make authorization decisions. All HTTP requests flow through them with metadata included about the source and destination services. The capabilities of Envoy are exposed by Istio in the form of the
DevOps platform provider JFrog is touting its new Private Distribution Network (PDN) as an “industry first,” because it allows DevOps teams to accelerate application updates through a lightweight solution that combines two network acceleration and optimization technologies —
Video games continue to Bharat Bhat (Okta marketing lead for developer relations) cover why and how video game platforms and connections should be more secure, with guest Okta senior developer advocate Video Game Security Should Be Simple for Developers Also available on Google Podcasts, PlayerFM, Spotify, TuneIn The gaming industry has often served as a showcase for some of the industry’s greatest programming talents. As a case in point,
Service mesh integration software provider Solo.io has released into general availability (GA) version 1.8 of its Gloo Edge Kubernetes-native ingress controller and API gateway. Version 1.8 offers integration for legacy SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) web services and other features, as Solo seeks to improve API-centric support for scaling needs across cloud native environments. Based on the Gloo Edge now helps DevOps teams integrate decades-old SOAP through a single API. Gloo Edge 1.8’s support for SOAP is “the biggest breakout feature” of the release, blog post, Gaun described how SOAP, an XML messaging protocol from the turn of the century, “remains prevalent today for enterprise web services across a number of industries, including financial services and healthcare.” Yet, “Unfortunately, SOAP (and associated legacy middleware applications) hold back large-scale modernization efforts because there hasn’t been a viable migration approach in the market,” Gaun wrote. “Organizations haven’t been able to tackle incremental deprecation of SOAP web services over time without great difficulty.” Gloo Edge Enterprise 1.8, with the addition of
The evolution of cloud storage as we know it is a fascinating journey filled with projects that built on one another to bring us to where we are today. Interestingly enough, most of the technology used to build a decentralized cloud storage network today has been available for decades. The fact that decentralized cloud storage is viable is mostly because of the growth of storage capacity available at the edge and the incredible increases we’ve made across the globe in bandwidth. Here are four key advancements throughout the years that have paved the way for decentralized cloud storage. Advancement #1: Network Bandwidth Increased JT Olio JT is the CTO at Storj. He oversees product development and led the re-architecture of Storj’s distributed cloud storage platform. He was previously director of engineering at Space Monkey, which was acquired by Vivint in 2014. JT has an MS in computer science from the University of Utah and a BS in computer science and mathematics from the University of Minnesota. There is a great paper by Charles Blake and Rodrigo Rodrigues entitled “
Calico, from network software provider Tigera, is a third-party plugin for Kubernetes geared to make full network connectivity more flexible and easier. Out of the box, Kubernetes provides the NetworkPolicy API for managing network policies within the cluster. The problem many Kubernetes admins find (especially those new to the technology) is that network can quickly become a rather complicated mess of YAML configurations, where you must configure traffic ingress and egress properly, or communication between Kubernetes objects (such as pods and containers) can be difficult. That’s where the likes of Flannel, which cannot configure network policies. With Calico, you can significantly enhance the Kubernetes networking configuration. Take, for instance, the feature limitations found in the default NetworkPolicy, which are: Policies are limited to a single environment and are applied only to pods marked with labels. You can only apply rules to pods, environments, or subnets. Rules can only contain protocols, numerical ports, or named ports. When you add the Calico plugin, the Continue reading
Network software provider Linkerd service mesh, has launched the public beta of William Morgan emphasizes that operational simplicity has always been a focus, he says that they expect Buoyant Cloud to take that one step further. “We want to take the operational burden off of the shoulders of whoever is bringing Linkerd into their organization. We want to handle that for you,” he said. “We want to carry the pager for you, we want to make it so that running Linkerd in production is a trivial task. This falls right in line with everything we’ve been doing with Linkerd since the very beginning — our focus has been really heavily on operational simplicity and on making it so that when you operate Linkerd, you’re not in this horrendous situation where you need to hire a team of experts just to maintain your service mesh. With Buoyant Cloud, we have the opportunity to take on a lot of those operational tasks for you, and make it so you get all Continue reading
Reza Ramezanpour Reza is a developer advocate at Tigera, working to promote adoption of Project Calico. Before joining Tigera, Reza worked as a systems engineer and network administrator. Public cloud infrastructures and microservices are pushing the limits of resources and service delivery beyond what was imaginable until very recently. To keep up with the demand, network infrastructures and network technologies had to evolve as well. Software-defined networking (SDN) is the pinnacle of advancement in cloud networking. By using SDN, developers can deliver an optimized, flexible networking experience that can adapt to the growing demands of their clients. This article will discuss how Tigera’s new Project Calico is an open source networking and security solution. Although it focuses on securing Kubernetes networking, Calico can also be used with OpenStack and other workloads. Calico uses a modular data plane that allows a flexible approach to networking, providing a solution for both current and future networking needs. VPP Continue reading
Well, wasn’t that fun? On June 8, 2021, many internet users went to their usual sites such as Amazon, Reddit, CNN, or the New York Times and found nothing but an “Error 503 service unavailable” and an ominous “connection failure” note. So, what happened? The Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) other features became important. In particular, everyone started demanding faster performance and lower latency. The solution? CDNs. These companies, which besides Fastly include market-leader Cloudflare, all use the same basic techniques to speed up the net. They take the data from popular sites and place it in distributed caches in points of presence (PoP) close to consumers. If that sounds familiar to you even if you’re a cloud native developer and not a network administrator there’s a good reason. CDNs were one of the first business models Continue reading
Enterprise virtualization software giant VMware says it is “redefining” security as it seeks to help customers meet the challenges associated with a skyrocketing number of threats, more numerous attack vectors, and having fewer human resources at their disposal to help keep attacks at bay. “So what we’re asking all of these IT security teams to do is essentially to do more — and there’s a lot more complexity,” 2020 Threat Landscape report results, 81% of the survey respondents reported a breach during the past 12 months — with four out of the five breaches (82%) deemed material. At the Continue reading
Mike Maney Mike Maney leads corporate communications for Linode. Over the years, he’s led global communications teams for high profile, culture-shifting businesses at Fortune 50 companies and helped early stage startups tell better stories. I have had the opportunity to work with a number of tech pioneers over the course of my career. So when an opportunity to interview two who were at the forefront of the internet and the cloud, I jumped at it. a vice president and chief internet evangelist for Google). Years later after the creation of TCP/IP, Linode, the company Aker built, turns 18 this year, I asked Cerf and Aker to weigh in on where we’ve been, where we are today, and where we’re going. You’ve both been in the business of cloud for many years. Looking back to when you first started in this business, how has Continue reading
Reza Ramezanpour Reza is a developer advocate at Tigera, working to promote adoption of Project Calico. Before joining Tigera, Reza worked as a systems engineer and network administrator. It has been a while since I have been excited to write about encrypted tunnels. It might be the sheer pain of troubleshooting old technologies or countless hours of falling down the rabbit hole of a project’s source code that always motivated me to pursue a better alternative — without much luck. However, I believe luck is finally on my side. In this blog post, we will explore using open source Tigera announced a tech preview of its TLS were available to encrypt workloads’ traffic at higher TCP/IP layers, in this case, the application layer. However, WireGuard targets traffic at a lower layer, the transport layer, which makes it effective for a wider range Continue reading
Bruce Davie Bruce is a computer scientist noted for his contributions to the field of networking. With Larry Peterson, he recently co-founded Systems Approach, LLC, to produce open source books and educational materials. He is a former VP and CTO for the Asia-Pacific region at VMware. Prior to that, he was a Fellow at Cisco Systems, leading a team of architects responsible for multiprotocol label switching (MPLS). Davie has over 30 years of networking industry experience and has co-authored 17 Requests for Comments (RFCs). He was recognized as an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow in 2009 and chaired ACM SIGCOMM from 2009 to 2013. Wireless networking is one of those technologies that is, for most of us, so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. WiFi permeates our homes, offices and coffee shops, while cellular networks allow us to stay connected in many other settings. Of course, network access of any sort is a lot less ubiquitous once you get out of densely populated areas. It turns out that making networking ubiquitous requires some fresh thinking about how wireless networks are built. This fresh approach has been realized in an open source project called
JT Olio JT is the CTO at Storj. He oversees product development and led the re-architecture of Storj’s distributed cloud storage platform. He was previously Director of Engineering at Space Monkey, which was acquired by Vivint in 2014. JT has an MS in Computer Science from the University of Utah and a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Minnesota. Our team at Storj is building a decentralized cloud object storage and when we decided to build it using Go, we thought we’d also utilize
With the newest edition of the gRPC protocol, Microservices-based systems will no longer need separate stand-alone service mesh sidecars, noted Envoy, one of the most popular sidecar proxies in use today. Created at Google and released in 2016,
Crossplane, has created what it says is the first enterprise distribution of Crossplane called Bassam Tabbara, Upbound founder and CEO, in an interview. Crossplane “becomes your universal control plane that you could use, using the same style that the Kubernetes community pioneered, to manage essentially all the infrastructure that an enterprise touches from a single control plane.” UXP, then, is an open source, vendor-supported, enterprise-grade distribution of Crossplane that also adds on a layer of 24/7 support, priority bug fixes, and consultation with a subscription. UXP is available free for individual users and by subscription for larger deployments, and is a drop-in replacement for Crossplane that installs with a single command. Tabbara noted that UXP is “vendor-supported, not community-supported,” in that Upbound will “help enterprises deploy it, support it, and give them a number of features that makes it easier for them to deploy and manage it in their environment.” As a long-term supported project, UXP also lags behind Crossplane upstream to ensure reliability, and Upbound describes UXP as “designed to help enterprises adopt a universal control plane, moving beyond infrastructure as code,” in a press statement. In the case of UXP, Crossplane is further extended with its integration with both Upbound Cloud and Upbound Registry, both of which became generally available at the same time as the release of UXP. Upbound Cloud provides teams with visibility into their UXP instances and the infrastructure being managed, giving them a place to see what is running where, and by who it was provisioned. Upbound Registry then provides a place to both publicly and privately share Crossplane Configurations, and for providers to share managed resources. “With UXB, with Upbound Cloud and Upbound Registry, we believe we have a set of products now that can actually take this approach of using control planes in the enterprise and turn it into essentially a new way of managing infrastructure,” Tabbara said. “We see this with existing customers today, maybe even replacing a lot of what they do today with tools like Terraform and infrastructure-as-code approaches and going more towards a control plane approach, or even gitOps on top of a control plane.” The big difference Tabbara sees in all of this is that, by taking the API-driven approach rather than relying on templates, as with infrastructure as code, Crossplane and UXP can deliver a more scalable experience to managing infrastructure across large and varied environments. He explained that part of the appeal of Crossplane lies in the fact that teams can use the same Kubernetes-based tools and approaches that they are already using to deploy software to provision and manage infrastructure. Sponsor Note LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that empowers all teams to safely deliver and control software through feature flags. By separating code deployments from feature releases, LaunchDarkly enables you to deploy faster, reduce risk, and iterate continuously. “If you are using Helm, or kustomize, or if you’re using literally any of the tools that people are deploying and love and use today with Kubernetes, as a container orchestrator, those tools work exactly in the same way,” said Tabbara. “When you’re using Kubernetes plus Crossplane to manage the rest of the cloud infrastructure and deployments across clouds and hybrid clouds, those tools work exactly in the same way. They are using Crossplane APIs that are extensions of Kubernetes extensions of the Kubernetes control plane.” Following the most recent KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, there were some