Executive Summary

Fortune 1000 organizations today are typically straddling two types of infrastructure: brownfield (typically on virtualization platforms like VMware vSphere, in addition to mainframes, database appliances, network security boxes, etc.), and “greenfield” (containerized applications on Kubernetes that are heavily automated for continuous integration and delivery). Businesses transitioning to microservices inevitably face three major hurdles: managing traffic flow, maintaining operational visibility, and enforcing consistent security policies across all services.

Service meshes solve these problems by weaving a uniform service management fabric across polyglot services using dynamically programmable layer-7 proxies that facilitates traffic management, consistent monitoring, authentication, and authorization. A service mesh such as Istio, setup in the right manner across brownfield and greenfield, is an ideal vehicle to accelerate brownfield transformation through safe and incremental migration of mission-critical legacy applications. But there are still several gaps when integrating open-source service mesh solutions into traditional enterprises composed of heterogeneous infrastructure. Some of the key gaps include the ability to seamlessly integrate VM workloads, multi-tenancy and controlled access to configuration changes.

Tetrate Service Bridge, powered by Istio and Envoy, is a self-service, multi-tenant platform to weave and manage the service mesh across VMs and Kubernetes clusters, on-prem and cloud. Developers, security engineers, and operations engineers across multiple teams can safely and securely manage their services without impacting others. A rich set of ecosystem integrations will simplify adoption in enterprise environments.

Shriram Rajagopalan
“Unprincipled Engineer”, Tetrate
Istio Co-creator, Envoy Contributor