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Arm and Tetrate strengthen the responsiveness of Istio service mesh with integrated hardware and software for
high performance computing and cloud-to-edge workloads

Press Release  |  12 April 2022

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Tetrate, founded by creators and maintainers of Istio and Envoy, today announced that Istio service mesh and Envoy proxy now support the Arm® Neoverse™ platform. Arm is the leading technology provider of processor IP and its designs have enabled more than 215 billion chips. Neoverse support enables widely used open source software projects to run faster, with less energy usage and lower total cost of ownership.

Neoverse is available on a wide range of cloud environments and for large-scale data center environments. Neoverse implementations include AWS Graviton2 processor-based Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which offer a price/performance improvement of up to 40% over comparable x86-based instances.

“The diversity of applications is rapidly changing, and Arm is addressing the growing need for increased performance to take on compute-intensive workloads like service mesh,” said Bhumik Patel, director of ecosystem development, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “By partnering with Tetrate to add Istio and Envoy support to Neoverse based platforms, we can bring better application performance, reduced energy consumption and lower TCO to customers of this industry-leading service mesh software.”

Neoverse is particularly well suited for complex workloads such as machine learning, AI, and now, service mesh. For example, AWS previewed Amazon EC2 instances powered by next-generation AWS Graviton3 processors, which will provide up to 25% better performance for compute-intensive workloads compared to current generation instances powered by Graviton2. AWS Graviton3 processors will deliver up to 2x higher floating-point performance for scientific and machine learning workloads, and will provide 50% higher memory bandwidth versus Graviton2-based instances to improve the performance of memory-intensive applications like scientific computing.

“We at Tetrate are seeing larger and more complex service mesh deployments that demand innovative solutions for meeting SLAs cost-effectively from edge to the cloud,” said Saptak Sen, vice president of Strategic Alliances at Tetrate. “We are proud to work with Arm, AWS, and the rest of the Envoy and Istio communities to help our customers in government, finance, ecommerce, and other markets make their mesh implementations more consistent, flexible, and scalable.”

Why Faster Performance is Important for Service Mesh

A service mesh is made up of microservices software instances which are created and destroyed to meet the capacity needs of an application at runtime. Each service instance is accompanied by a proxy instance, and messages between services are routed through the proxy instances.

Each message between services, or between services and the control plane, is authenticated, authorized, and encrypted/decrypted, boosting security. All of this work is compute-intensive, and encryption and decryption in particular are numerically intensive. Faster performance from the underlying hardware infrastructure can make a tremendous difference in the responsiveness of the service mesh.

Istio is the leading service mesh, and Istio software includes an extended version of the Envoy proxy. Tetrate is optimizing Istio and the Envoy proxy for performance. Neoverse supports these efforts and gives a solid boost to Istio and Envoy performance. Accelerating these software projects also yields higher performance when running Tetrate’s industry-leading service mesh management software, Tetrate Service Bridge.

How Istio Service Mesh Delivers for Government and Industry

Istio service mesh, accelerated by Arm Neoverse on multiple platforms, supports a number of benefits important to government and industry:

• Security. Service mesh performs authentication, authorization, and encryption/decryption on every communication among service instances and with the control plane, enhancing security. Neoverse speeds the necessary processing, including numerical processing for encryption and decryption.
• Agility. Service mesh supports rapid software development using continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) approaches. Neoverse provides a platform for accelerated performance, which can be managed and enhanced across software updates.
• Business continuity. With service mesh, architects can create applications that can fail over from on-premises to cloud, from one availability zone in the cloud to another, and even from one cloud to another. Neoverse support is available on all these platforms, giving applications consistent performance optimization across all deployment targets.

Download Arm-Ready Versions of Istio

Those interested can download Arm-ready versions of Istio from Tetrate Labs. Options include a FIPS version, compliant with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2, Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules. And the number of options for accessing Istio running on Neoverse across multiple platforms is large and growing. To learn more, contact Tetrate.

About Arm

Arm technology is at the heart of a computing and data revolution that is transforming the way people live and businesses operate. Our energy-efficient processor designs and software platforms have enabled advanced computing in more than 215 billion chips and our technologies securely power products from the sensor to the smartphone and the supercomputer. Together with 1,000+ technology partners we are at the forefront of designing, securing and managing all areas of AI-enhanced connected compute from the chip to the cloud.

About Tetrate

Started by Istio founders to reimagine application networking, Tetrate is an enterprise service mesh company managing the complexity of modern, hybrid cloud application infrastructure. Its flagship product, Tetrate Service Bridge, provides an edge-to-workload application connectivity platform to deliver business continuity, agility, and security for enterprises on the journey from traditional monoliths to the cloud. Customers get consistent, baked-in observability, runtime security and traffic management in any environment. Tetrate remains a top contributor to the open-source projects Istio and Envoy Proxy. Find out more at www.tetrate.io.

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Media Contact
Annie Fink, Bospar
Annie@bospar.com