Cloud Field Day 6 Preview - Solo.Io
Solo.io is set to present to the Tech Field Day delegates and audience at the upcoming Cloud Field Day 6 event September 25-27 in Silicon Valley. Different events sometimes hit upon repeating themes. At Security Field Day 2, microsegmentation was the consistent theme. Cloud Field Day 6 is shaping up to be very much about kubernetes + service mesh. Solo.Io is a vendor in the service mesh business. Right now, that’s a good business to be in because it’s one of the hottest trends in the IT industry at the moment. Solo.io will tell us more about their offerings and what sets them apart from the numerous other companies operating in that space.
While I’m familiar with microservices, most of my customers still use monolithic application designs. I’ll be doing my best to cram on these topics before the presentations.
Service Mesh as a technology area seems to be a response to the microservices architecture trend of the last few years. When the monolithic apps are broken down into smaller units, there’s a possibility for confusion. The number of services could be quite high for some modern apps. It’s said that Netflix runs more than 500+ microservices in AWS. The microservice architecture allows a section of an application to break without the entire application crashing. A popular example is a payment processing portion of a website being down, but the logon, browsing, and shopping carts still running fine. In fact, the payment processing example is sometimes broken down even further such that only VISA processing is broken, but Mastercard and American Express continue working like normal. It’s easy to see how the number of services could grow to numbers in the dozens or hundreds. Service meshes provide a listing of the different services and also provide routing information between those services. As the number o services grow, service meshes maintain a sense of order.
Solo.io makes a couple of different apps. The first is Gloo. Gloo is a like the mother of all input gateways. The official description from their website is “Gloo is a modern API Gateway built on the Envoy Proxy to easily control all traffic across your monolithic and microservices applications to serverless functions on any infrastructure.“ That’s a mouthful, but in english, it translates to helping apps talk to each other. The folks at Solo.io put together a demo video that shows what this means in the real world. Essentially, it’s tech that helps us do the things cloud architects casually talk about all the time - extending monolithic apps to microservices based apps. Gloo simplifies a lot of that heavy lifting.
Service Mesh Hub “provides a dashboard see the state of the service meshes on your cluster, and to discover, deploy, and manage extensions for those meshes.“ It’s a neat idea. One of their goals is to help drive adoption of service mesh technology. Solo.io says they are agnostic as they do not create their own mesh. As more developers deploy apps that rely on service mesh technology, this could become an issue for IT shops asked to monitor and maintain them. Also, anyone who’s been in IT operations can attest to management’s love of dashboards.
My fellow Field Day delegate Ned Bellavance recently wrote a blog post that discusses thier tech a bit deeper. It’s well worth a read to prep for Friday’s talk.
Solo.io presents live, Friday Sept. 27 from 12:30 -14:30 PST. I’ll be live tweeting the event. Follow me @nathaniel_avery on Twitter. My fellow delegates will also be on. We’ll pass along any questions from the audience during the event, so feel free to @ us.