Fudge Sunday - Multicloud, XaaS, and Service Mesh
A look at Multicloud Data Services and everything evolving to be a service with an increasing emphasis on observability
This week we take a look at Multicloud Data Services and everything evolving to be a service with an increasing emphasis on observability.
Getting Informed
If you’ve read a few of my newsletter issues, you know I believe strongly in the inevitable nature of multicloud and multicloud data services. As such, I am linking to my disclosure at the end of each newsletter issue.
On the way to our multicloud future, a key element of successful outcomes will be increased observability. As such, getting informed about what companies and technologies will promote easier access to observability is worth exploring further across various service mesh related projects like Istio, Consul, Envoy, Kuma, Helm, Linkerd, eBPF, Cilium, and SMI.
Blog posts can be a great place to take in longer form perspectives on a specific topic like “service mesh”. This week we’ll start with one blog post that provides opinionated insights into identifying, managing, and securing the communication of many services.
I’ve written down my thoughts on how eBPF will help solve service mesh complexity and performance by getting rid of sidecars.
If you take time to read this blog post you’ll learn that one alternative to chained sidecar proxy oriented Service Mesh is…. eBPF Service Mesh. In shorter terms, just take the complexity to the kernel.
Again, the blog post is both informative and opinionated. Specifically, this blog post is the perspective of Isovalent, a company that provides commercially supported implementations of eBPF and Cilium.
Does Isovalent sound familiar? They should.
Isovalent raised ~$29M for simplified access to eBPF and Cilium.
Of course, the Investments in the service mesh market space have been more that just Isovalent and go back more than just one year. So, let’s take a look over the past few years at a few companies such as Tetrate, VMware, HashiCorp, Tigera, Buoyant, Weaveworks, Solo, Microsoft, and Kentik.
HashiCorp announced Consul as a solution for service discovery and configuration.
Buoyant raised $10.5M (total of $24M) for microservices management.
Tigera raised $30M (total of $53M) for security and compliance of Kubernetes containers.
VMware announced NSX® Service Mesh announced based upon Istio that was extended for visibility, control, and security.
Tetrate raised $12.5M for app management platform of hybrid and multicloud environments.
Microsoft announced Service Mesh Interface for Kubernetes for managing application environments and networks with Docker, Pivotal, and VMware.
Kentik raised $23.5M (total of $61.7M) for enterprise network intelligence services.
Weaveworks raised $36.6M (total of $60M) for Kubernetes cloud management.
Microsoft announces Open Service Mesh for building complex modular apps more easily.
Tetrate raised $40M (total of $52.5M) for app management platform of hybrid and multicloud environments.
Solo raised $135M (total of $171M) for APIs that connect networking software, data, and hardware.
HashiCorp closed up 6.49% in its Nasdaq debut, after raising $1.2B in its IPO at a $14B valuation.
When I read the tweet that inspired this newsletter issue my response was:
Good stuff. I look forward to opinionated blog posts from each of these other companies (companies that just happen to support similar and differing projects with common service mesh goals)
sources:
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