Cloud-native software company Solo.io Inc. today is making available what it says is the industry’s first Istio Developer Portal, which aims to streamline the onboarding process for developers in order to improve experiences and productivity.

Solo sells software that helps companies address the challenges of implementing microservices, which are the components of modern, containerized applications that can run in multiple computing environments. It offers a variety of tools that help with this, including its Service Mesh Hub, which helps organizations streamline the deployment, management and extensibility of any service mesh on any cloud, for any application.

Service meshes, of which the open-source Istio is one of the most widely used, are becoming increasingly prominent in modern information technology architectures. Essentially, they’re a dedicated infrastructure layer that’s used to control service-to-service communication over a network. They provide a way for separate parts of an application to communicate with each other.

As companies modernize their information technology around microservices, service meshes and application programming interfaces are gaining importance. But until today, they’ve had no way to effectively catalog their APIs, which makes it difficult for developers to use them in their application development process in a secure manner.

Solo’s Istio Developer Portal gives companies a way to catalog, manage and securely publish APIs within a custom, branded portal that can help to accelerate onboarding of developers, both inside and outside of their organizations. The new service also boosts security for Istio by integrating with authentication systems, Single Sign-On services and API Keys capabilities.

With the Istio Developer Portal, developers can take advantage of new management tools that enable them to curate, document, expose and secure APIs running in Istio to other users within their organization, and also third parties. The service also provides a clean and intuitive user interface that makes it easier for developers to search for, browse through and test the APIs they’re authorized to use.

Solo’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Idit Levine (pictured) said the Istio Developer Portal would make it easier and safer for companies looking to use Istio in their own IT environments. “With this release, we continue on our mission to help organizations on their cloud-native journey to modernize their critical applications,” Levine said.

Levine appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the 2018 Cloud Foundry Summit, where she talked more about how the company is working to make service meshes such as Istio easier to work with:

Photo: SiliconANGLE