SoloCon 2022 Comes to an End…. Until Next Year ;)

Sooooo….What did we hear about this year at SoloCon?….

It was great to see so much info being shared at SoloCon. Think it would have been nice to meet up, have a bunch of hallway talks, and all that neat stuff, huh? Who knows, maybe future SoloCons will have in-person or hybrid options. But it was great to see all the sessions, and the chat was a happenin’ place.

As SoloCon 2022 comes to a close, let’s take a moment to celebrate the most thought-provoking and insightful talks, from both our Customers and Soloists.

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

Idit, Brian, and Christian opened up fantastically and illustrated the journey that Solo has been on for the last few years. But before we get into it….

Straight from SoloCon we’re bringing you some amazing smiles and excitement (and the amazing people behind them!) 

LOOK AT THE ENERGY OVER HERE!!!
@linsun_unc, @RamVennam, @christianposta

Quite the coloring skills you got there, Art 😉 (@artberger) 

🐝 And here we have this marvelous trio of BumbleBees 🐝

@linsun_unc, @willowmck1

Joe Searcy (T-Mobile) showing off how Gloo Application Networking runs like butter

Nina’s got the scoop on Service Mesh, Istio, and VM integration

And finally, a excerpt from this article recently written by Beth Pariseau:

“Solo.io turns heads amid service mesh struggles”

Most mainstream companies lack the in-house technical expertise to manage the raw open source version of Istio. That gap between tech features and expertise presents a ripe opportunity for IT vendors such as Istio-based network platform startup Solo.io. Over the last year, Solo.io has amassed about 100 customers, including USAA, Chick-fil-A, T-Mobile and Constant Contact, as well as a $135 million Series C funding round and a billion-dollar valuation.”

Let’s Recap…

There were a LOT of new announcements. Check these out…

Gloo Mesh 2.0

• Solo.io announced Gloo Mesh Enterprise 2.0
• New enhancements for customers who manage hundreds of Kubernetes clusters, up to 100 million transactions per day, thousands of internal APIs, as well as large and diverse development teams.

GraphQL for Gloo Edge Beta

• Solo.io announced yesterday that GraphQL for Gloo Edge is now in beta! Solo.io has been exploring common patterns, benefits and limitations of standalone GraphQL, along with how to combine GraphQL with Envoy Proxy, and why Gloo Edge is a great platform for success. Find more details in this new blog.

Solo Academy

• Solo.io also announced a new way to access their workshops. In addition to all the live workshops which are offered in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, they are now offering developer-focused on demand courses through Solo Academy. 
• We’ve got two certification courses available on demand: 
  • Get Started with Istio (an introductory level course with a certification option)
  • Deploy Istio for Production (an intermediate level course with a certification option).

Wasme CLI and WASM Hub donation to CNCF

• During the SoloCon session “State of WebAssembly in Service Mesh and Future of Wasm”, Solo.io’s Director of Open Source Lin Sun and Team Lead Shane O’Donnell shared Solo.io’s plans to donate their wasme CLI (a tool for building, pushing, and deploying Envoy WebAssembly filters) as well as WebAssemblyHub to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, CNCF. 

Executive team growth

• Rob Bailer joins as CFO 
• Brian Gracely joins as VP of Product Strategy

Rapid Innovation and Significant Momentum

• Solo.io Founder and CEO Idit Levine shared key announcements and news updates yesterday highlighting the company’s growth over the past year and trajectory moving into the future. 

Four New Workshops

• Operationalizing Istio for Day 2 Workshop with Certification Option: This is the third part in a series of Solo.io’s Istio workshops where you’ll learn how best to integrate Istio with the rest of your workflows, tooling and organization and can earn your “Expert for Istio” certification badge.
• Fundamentals for eBPF with Certification Option: In this new workshop, you’ll learn the main concepts of eBPF, different ways to create eBPF programs, build and deploy eBPF using BumbleBee and have an opportunity to earn your “Fundamentals for eBPF” certification badge. 
• Using Envoy Proxy as a GraphQL Engine: Thinking about deploying a GraphQL API? In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use Gloo Edge to automatically discover services and create a GraphQL schema, create a GraphQL resolver that calls different services and uses them in a schema, and learn more about security and testing options for your GraphQL API.
• Multi-tenant Istio Service Mesh with Gloo Mesh: In this hands-on workshop Solo.io will explain many Istio concept including, multi-cluster topologies, identity federation, authorization and demonstrate how Gloo Mesh can simplify the management of a complex heterogeneous service mesh with a particular focus on multi tenancy.

Total Content @  SoloCon 2022

There was so much great information to be found at SoloCon this year. There were 48 new sessions that included 2 keynotes, 29 technology and solution focused sessions, 8 lightning talks, and 11 workshops (including 4 brand new workshops). We got to hear stories from 9 of Solo’s customers (T-Mobile, USAA, Constant Contact, CARFAX, Snyk, Ory, Waylay, Invitae, and Schnieder Electric), plus technology partners Google, AWS, and Weaveworks. 

In case you missed any of these sessions but wanna check them out, head over to solocon.io to catch all replays.

And That’s A Wrap!

We at Solo.io would like to thank EVERYONE for attending SoloCon 2022 this year. Looking forward to our next SoloCon… 

See you there 😎🦉⛵🚀🐝