TETRATE EMERGES FROM STEALTH TO BRING SERVICE MESH TO THE ENTERPRISE

The architects of open source service mesh technology Istio and Envoy have broken off to set up an enterprise-grade solution aimed at large-scale customers.

Tetrate has been in stealth mode for the past year while they looked to solve some of the biggest issues enterprises may have in adopting service mesh technology.

The founding team includes Varun Talwar, a former Google engineer who helped build the company's own open source service mesh solution, Istio, and former Twitter cloud engineer Jeyappragash Jeyakeerthi.

As containers have increasingly become the industry standard for cloud deployments, service mesh has emerged as a way to unify traffic flow management, access policy enforcement and telemetry data aggregation across microservices into a shared management console.

Tetrate focuses on combining Envoy - a service proxy built in-house at ridesharing company Lyft - and Istio, the control plane to Envoy's data plane, into a true enterprise service mesh.

"We are trying to simplify the complexity of configurations around Istio to something small and digestible," Tetrate CEO Varun Talwar told Computerworld UK. "So every team gets a UX experience where they can start programming the behaviour of traffic and the security they want and have clean interactions between themselves and their central network and security teams."

The idea is to ease the administrative complexity placed on teams having to operate lots of microservices across hybrid or large-scale, complex environments..

The San Francisco-based company emerged from stealth mode this week with $12.5 million of funding, led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from Intel Capital, Samsung NEXT, and Rain Capital, with that money earmarked for growing its globally distributed team of 20 and ramping up marketing and go-to-market.

The company is also launching Service Mesh Day, the first industry event focused on service mesh, later this month in San Francisco, supported by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Google.