When we launched Gloo Platform in the fall of 2022, we introduced the concept of Cloud Native 2.0. It was our signal to the market that while many outstanding technologies, such as Kubernetes, Envoy, Istio, have been built over the last 5+ years, the reality is that there were going to be some big “next steps” needed to make the technologies applicable for a broad set of customer applications. While containers are important, most companies are struggling to pull together existing virtual machines, containers and serverless, across multiple private and public cloud environments.
As we come together as a community this week in Amsterdam for Application Networking Day and CloudNativeCon, the focus has become much bigger than just Kubernetes. While Kubernetes is the fabric that ties together container environments, something more is needed to tie Kubernetes into the bigger cloud architectures that companies are building today.
It’s within that context that we’re excited to announce the public preview of Solo Gloo Fabric, which brings multi-cloud discovery, connectivity, security and observability to any application across any cloud. Gloo Fabric becomes the latest addition to Gloo Platform, the industry’s leading cloud-native application networking platform. Read the press release here.
The challenges of modern application networking
With the widespread adoption of cloud-native applications, we no longer live in a world of siloed teams and siloed technologies. This has been our guiding principle for the past few years, as we built the Gloo Platform architecture.
- Platform Engineering is bringing together infrastructure, security and SRE teams to simplify deployments and operations for application teams.
- GitOps is enabling an automated, deterministic model for infrastructure and application deployments.
- The worlds of API management and service connectivity are quickly merging, as service mesh implementations become easier to deploy and manage, and projects such as Gateway-API become embedded functionality of cloud-native infrastructure.
Given the evolution of all of these application networking technologies, companies are now asking how they can be applied to more than just containers.
Discovery, connectivity, security and observability
As companies look to migrate applications to the cloud, and modernize those applications, they are faced with a fundamental challenge – extend legacy approaches into the cloud, or adopt cloud-native approaches to move them into the future. Gloo Fabric enables powerful new capabilities that will help companies discover, connect, secure and observe any of their applications, across any cloud.
Gloo Fabric builds on several foundational elements that already existed within Gloo Platform.
- Unified API for provisioning and interacting with the platform, across all functionality
- Unified Management Control Plane to manage network and security policies
- Dynamic discovery of network and cluster resources
- API management
- Multi-tenant isolation of resources across clusters
- Automatic zero-trust security
- Integrated observability across the platform
An open approach to multi-cloud networking
As we spoke with many companies, one of the most common complaints was that their existing options in the market were too limiting. They were either too tied to a specific technology, or too tied to a specific cloud. While those approaches might be useful for a single large vendor, they were too restrictive for companies that have to manage a balance of existing and new applications, as well as applications running across multiple clouds.
What companies wanted was a way to bring together existing applications in VMs, with their emerging applications running across containers and serverless environments. And they needed a solution that would support best practices for platform engineering teams including a uniform, declarative API for discovery, connectivity, and observability across cloud providers and workload types.
A cloud-native approach to multi-cloud networking
Gloo Fabric brings together powerful cloud-native concepts to create an application networking architecture that meets the complex needs of today’s enterprise companies.
Dynamic discovery identifies resources in Kubernetes clusters, as well as VM and serverless resources, across any cloud. Workspaces can then be used to group these resources into isolated network and security scopes that align to team boundaries across cloud providers.
Those resources are then mapped across infrastructure, clusters and cloud networking VPCs.
Gloo Fabric integrates with Gloo Mesh, as well as existing private and public cloud infrastructures, all managed by a unified API and unified control plane.
Early preview of Gloo Fabric
We’re very excited about this new phase of Gloo Platform evolution.
We introduced Gloo Fabric this morning at Application Networking Day in Amsterdam, including an overview, demo and Q&A session. Gloo Fabric is in early preview, so reach out if you have questions or would like to request a demo.
