Enterprise support for Istio in production

With the exploding popularity of Kubernetes has come a corresponding interest in Istio as a service mesh to support distributed applications and microservices. The challenge is that Istio can be complex for those unfamiliar with its features (and limitations.) Solo.io provides enterprise support for Istio environments to help you avoid pitfalls and resolve issues quickly.

While open source Istio provides a good foundation for security, reliability, and extensibility, you probably need to address a few gaps before you are production-ready for critical applications and microservices. 

We provide the following advantages for open source Istio and Envoy Proxy:

• 24/7 production and long-term support (LTS) of validated upstream Istio software
• Dedicated service level agreements (SLAs)
• Unlimited incidents
• Private Slack channel, email, and phone communications
• Self-service ticketing
• Quarterly version releases (security & critical fixes as needed)
• One year of software maintenance and support per major Istio release
• Patches and security hot-fixes backported for supported Istio versions (N-4: meaning the current and previous four versions)
• Assistance with common operating environments, including Kubernetes, VMs, AWS (Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS), Azure (Compute and AKS), Google Cloud, RedHat OpenShift, etc.
• Best practices guidelines, architecture reviews, and help driving upstream bugs or feature requests
• Advice on version to version deltas and upgrades

In addition, as a distributed company we have a robust “follow-the-sun” model with engineers in countries around the world. See the map below for engineering staff locations.

Our SLAs by severity are:

1 – Urgent – one hour response time (24 x 7 x 365)

2 – High – four business hours (Monday – Friday 9am – 6pm US Eastern Time)

3 – Normal – eight business hours (Monday – Friday 9am – 6pm US Eastern Time)

4 – Low – 24 business hours (Monday – Friday 9am – 6pm US Eastern Time)

One special advantage is our creation of a dedicated private Slack channel for each support customer, where you can ask questions and get a quick response from an engineer. We hear regularly that this offering saves customers hours, days, or even weeks of time in researching and resolving issues. This approach is so loved that many of our customers have asked other vendors to offer the same service. Of course, we have open community Slack channels with over 3,400 members too!

You’ll get access to all our experts, many of whom are actively contributing to Istio and related open source projects. Here’s just one example with Istio discovery selectors but there are many more!

If you are inclined, Gloo Mesh Enterprise also has many features that go even further in enhancing open source Istio. You can see the feature comparison here.

Ask us today about enterprise Istio support for your service mesh. With Solo helping reduce the complexity of your service mesh, you can start to build novel solutions on top of that new structure. Our enterprise support can save you a lot of time and effort and resolve issues faster, so you can focus on your applications!

Here are a few people’s thoughts about what it’s like to work with Solo:

“Collaborating with the team at Solo.io has been great. They are very responsive in helping us with our Gloo environment, brainstorming ideas on how to solve our issues and even beyond Gloo Edge, and responding to the questions we’ve had on Kubernetes like load balancing and how the ecosystem of tools works together. They are truly invested in our success.” – Jonathan Lane, senior manager, software engineering, API Platform at Vonage

“We chose Gloo for the outstanding responsiveness of the Solo.io team to issues and requests for enhancements.” – Derrick Burns, cloud architect at Tidepool.org

“We selected Gloo because of its flexibility and the great experience we had working with the Solo.io team.” – Felix Roberge, CEO, D-TECK Solutions

“The documentation and active community make it easy to get started and provide a lot of help and support for end users like us.” – Ievgenii Shepeliuk, acting CTO, New Age Solutions

“Solo has been a major component and innovator in this space. Has grown its Istio contributions over time, so I’m super enthusiastic about that. Solo has pushed the boundaries of what users do with mesh.” – Louis Ryan, principal engineer, Google Cloud