Tetrate Launches Open Source Project “GetIstio,” Announces New Community, Learning Resources, and Partnerships 

San Fransisco–(Business Wire)–Tetrate today launched GetIstio, an open source distribution of upstream Istio that makes it easier for users to deploy and upgrade validated Istio. Istio is the leading and most widely adopted service mesh, a dedicated layer of infrastructure for observing, managing, and securing a network of services. As per CNCF’s 2020 Survey, 47% of organizations using a service mesh in production use Istio.

“A service mesh implementation can be complex and we are making it simpler and accessible by building a rich knowledge base, free training and a forum for adopters to socialize with experts,“ said Tetrate co-founder and CEO Varun Talwar. “Istio is one part of the mesh puzzle and the other part is Envoy Proxy. What’s good can always get better. Our bi-weekly community meetings aim to bring it all together with support from integrating technology partners.”

Many enterprises that rely on managed Kubernetes offerings from cloud providers turn to Istio for a comprehensive layer of security for workloads deployed on VMs or Kubernetes.

The latest initiative from Tetrate serves three key purposes:

1. Providing safe, vetted Istio distributions for both upstream and FIPS compliant versions – tested against AKS, EKS and GKE
2. Offering an optional CLI that makes Istio easier to use
3. Building a community that brings together Istio and Envoy users and technology partners enriched by knowledge sharing and training.

Community meetings to foster Istio and Envoy adoption

Biweekly community meetings will provide a forum for practitioners and partners to share use cases and solutions with the rest of the Istio and Envoy Proxy community. The inaugural meeting is scheduled for Feb. 18, 2021. A free online training on the fundamentals of Istio is also available now at https://academy.tetrate.io. For more advanced users of Istio, getistio.io will now also be hosting a growing body of tutorials.

“At Tracfone, we’ve built an immutable infrastructure with k8s, Istio and a custom CI/CD platform. We leverage Istio for an array of capabilities like traffic management, telemetry, zero-trust security and more. Istio training from Tetrate Academy is a great resource for our teams to learn Istio fast and get the most out of it,” said Kartik Rallapalli, Principal Enterprise Architect of Tracfone.

Building the Istio Ecosystem

Although service mesh adoption is still early among the enterprises, there are already a good number of products in the cloud-native ecosystem that integrate with or use Istio as part of their overall solution.

Weaveworks co-founder and CEO Alexis Richardson: ”In combination with a service mesh like Istio, Weave GitOps workflows automate progressive deployment strategies / canary management in Kubernetes. Tetrate’s new GetIstio product makes this simple, providing users with a quick and safe way to deploy Istio into their GitOps workflows.”

Istio and Envoy present a newer and more reliable way to secure application communication by adhering to fundamental security best practices. For an end-to-end mTLS implementation, if enterprises want to leverage their preferred CA, this is made possible using the CSR API. Through its GetIstio initiative, Tetrate is already collaborating with AppviewX, KeyFactor and Venafi for integrations.

“Working with the Istio community, we’re pleased to have developed ‘istio-csr,’ open source software to integrate Istio with cert-manager. This enables workload certificates to be issued from the wide array of certificate authorities and providers that cert-manager supports, including Venafi, Google Certificate Authority Service (CAS) and more,” said Jetstack CTO and co-founder Matt Bates. “We look forward to collaborating with the GetIstio community to provide an easy and seamless integration, enabling operators and security teams to tap into cert-manager and secure the mesh from the get-go.”

About Tetrate

Tetrate, the enterprise service mesh company, was established to manage the complexity of modern, hybrid cloud application infrastructure. Its flagship product, Tetrate Service Bridge, provides a comprehensive, enterprise-ready service mesh platform built for multi-cluster, multitenancy, and multi-cloud.

Tetrate is a top contributor to the open source projects Istio and Envoy Proxy, and previously created the open source sister to GetIstio, GetEnvoy, which makes it easier for organizations to get started with the Envoy proxy. There have been more than 73,000 downloads of GetEnvoy in the past year.

Please contact us for more information. Find out more at www.getistio.io and www.tetrate.io.

Contacts
Kourtney Evans
kourtney@bospar.com