VMware Inc. is trying to help companies that struggle to maintain hybrid cloud application connectivity with the launch of a new platform that combines its Tanzu Service Mesh product with its NSX Advanced Load Balancer.

VMware’s Modern Apps Connectivity platform is designed to enable end-to-end application connectivity in any cloud environment, the company said today.

VMware’s Tanzu Service Mesh is a curated instance of the open-source Istio service mesh that runs on Kubernetes, providing a dedicated infrastructure layer that facilitates service-to-service communications between microservices, the components of modern, containerized apps. VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer ALB, meanwhile, is based on networking software VMware gained with the acquisition of Avi Networks in 2019

Pere Monclus, vice president and chief technology officer of VMware’s network and security business, said in a blog post that the combined offering should help enterprises that experience connectivity issues as they attempt to move modern applications into production. The Modern Apps Connectivity platform is meant to serve as a central place for managing app connectivity and security across hybrid environments and hybrid app architectures, he added.

It should be a useful tool for many enterprises, Monclus explained, because the number of microservices exposing application programming interfaces in production environments is growing rapidly as new apps are pushed out. As such, organizations will need a way to provide them with a consistent set of networking services. At present, most microservices rely on an API gateway to communicate with others, but as their numbers grow, most companies will use a service mesh to manage these communications, Monclus said.

Using a service mesh, it becomes easier for developers to invoke network services programmatically in a way that makes it easier to integrate them within large DevOps workflows. By combining its Tanzu service mesh with its NSX load balancer, VMware has created a single portal for the management of unified policies, monitoring, visualization and observability, Monclus explained.

“The VMware Modern Apps Connectivity solution offers a rich set of integrated application delivery services [such as] enterprise-grade L4 load balancing, ingress controller, global load balancing (GSLB), web application security, integrated IPAM and DNS, end-to-end service visibility and encryption, and an extensible policy framework for intelligent traffic management and security,” Monclus wrote. “Through the integrated solution, operators can centrally manage end-to-end application traffic routing, resiliency, and security policies via Tanzu Service Mesh.”

The service is platform-agnostic too, and works with VMware Tanzu, Amazon EKS and upstream Kubernetes at launch. It’s in preview on Red Hat OpenShift, Microsoft Azure AKS and Google GKE.

Monclus said companies looking to connect their Kubernetes apps across virtual machines, or those that want to ensure app continuity and resiliency, can benefit from using the Modern Apps Connectivity platform.

“The future of VMware lies in Tanzu, and so the company is ensuring that NSX supports Tanzu better,” said Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller. “It makes sense that software-defined networking can be used to scale container-based applications more efficiently, but the proof in the pudding will be whether or not it works in multicloud deployments. That we will see when support is expanded beyond AWS to the other cloud players.”

Image: VMware