Solo has announced the availability of Gloo Network for Cilium, an enterprise-grade network management solution powered by eBPF designed to accelerate Cilium adoption.
Known for its cloud-native API gateway, management services and service mesh, Solo’s interest in Cilium stems from the technology’s ability to enable secure network connectivity between application services deployed using Linux container management platforms like Kubernetes. To complete our definitions, eBPF is a high-performance networking and load-balancing technology used in cloud datacentre environments. Why does any of this matter? Because enterprises want to double up, work faster and be able to streamline integration across hybrid cloud environments.
Networking, scalability & observability
Gloo Network for Cilium combines networking, scalability and observability tools, three of the major cornerstone practices and disciplines needed to be able to ‘look into’ the essentially abstracted virtualised world of cloud computing. The technology is built to create an integrated way to streamline Cilium’s onboarding, integration and its own monitoring.
“Cilium is helping reshape the future of cloud-native networking thanks to its capabilities and ecosystem. But deploying upstream Cilium has proven to be a complex endeavour for organizations,” said Idit Levine, CEO and Founder of Solo.io. “With Gloo Network for Cilium, we’re enabling organizations to maximise their cloud networking potential by removing the complexity and providing access to our support team to ensure their ongoing success. Gloo Network for Cilium is an ideal starting point for those considering Cilium for application networking and provides them with options as their company’s needs evolve.”
Working software mechanics
Looking at the working mechanics inside Gloo Network for Cilium, the team point to ease of use and reduced complexity. In a world where cloud networking is still widely regarded as a precision-engineered rocket science task placed in the hands of a small number of IT professionals, Solo highlights the way we can now simplify the adoption of ‘upstream Cilium’ (see below) and reduce network setup and management time.
As Red Hat reminds us, “Within information technology, the term upstream (and the related term ‘downstream’) refers to the flow of data. An upstream in open source is the source repository and project where contributions happen and releases are made. The contributions flow from upstream to downstream.”
In other words, upstream can also be considered to be that element of a software project that has been forked, contributed to, extended and skewed in one way or another – not necessarily in a bad way – so that it can perform more functions… all of which is fabulous, but may also result in upstream adoption being tougher to pull off, hence the story thread that plays out here.
Did someone mention ‘insights’?
Other points of reference include enhanced performance and observability in cloud-native infrastructures with eBPF technology. Enhanced service quality to reduce downtime and boost reliability with automated insights based on Solo.io’s own expertise. The technology also speeds up issue resolutions, reduces downtime and promises to increase resilience with enhanced network management tools and insights. Did someone forget to mention insights? No, this is a firm selling cloud network management tooling, we expect insights constantly, actionable ones ideally.
“Solo.io is committed to driving the advancement of cloud-native application networking technologies within the CNCF community and as Cilium continues to establish itself for the value it brings organisations, we’re invested in ensuring those benefits are translated to customers,” added Levine.
The team has also included risk mitigation planning to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with effective network monitoring and advanced security features. Finally, for now, there is also a consideration for scalability and future-proofing to ensure network infrastructure meets evolving business demands with scalable network architectures.
Free image: Wikimedia Commons
21 hours ago
