Cloud-native company Solo.io yesterday announced a new open-source project aimed at accelerating adoption of the service mesh Istio. The project, Istio Ambient Mesh, provides a new architecture for Istio that offers greater flexibility, security, and performance.
“Istio is the future of service mesh, and Ambient Mesh brings a whole new level of flexibility for companies that deploy Istio — along with ease of use, boosted performance, and reduced cost,” said Idit Levine, CEO and co-founder of Solo.io. “Since its inception five years ago, Istio has become the de facto service mesh standard. All along, we have listened to customers and recognized the need to enable larger, more diverse types of applications. Our work on the Istio Steering Committee and Istio Technical Oversight Committee has placed us in the unique position to chart the course of Istio. We have customers running 30 billion transactions a day — and the number, scope, and scale of these workloads is always increasing. Istio Ambient Mesh allows companies to adjust for cost, observability, and performance based on their individual application needs — this is a market first, and a ‘must-have’ for modern enterprises.”
According to Solo.io, Istio solves a number of challenges that the community faces by improving performance of applications using service mesh, reducing overhead resources, simplifying operations, enabling greater flexibility for services that don’t require full Layer 7 services, enabling multi-tenancy applications to use service mesh, and addressing the modularity of future technologies to be incorporated into service mesh.
It is compatible with sidecar-based Istio deployments, and according to Solo.io, there is no loss of platform management capabilities, no loss of application-specific security or application offload capabilities, and teams don’t need to learn new programming languages to use it.
The project was developed in collaboration with Google and is being donated to the Istio project. It is currently in beta for Solo.io customers and will be generally available when Solo.io releases Gloo Mesh 2.1.
