Dedicated infrastructure layers found in service meshes like Istio, along with other containers add-ons, are addressing the challenges developers and operators face.

Safer rollouts, for example, is a challenge Istio solves, says Varun Talwar (pictured), co-founder of Tetrate.io Inc. “How are my services performing? Where is the latency, error rate?” are the kinds of questions that can be answered by implementing Tetrate’s Service Mesh, he says.

Service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that’s added to applications allowing capabilities like traffic management and security. It does that without requiring the code to be added to.

Talwar spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Paul Gillin and guest host Keith Townsend in a conversation at last year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the various forms of infrastructure for containers and how it was helping development. (* Disclosure below.)

Consistency in observability

Consistency in observability, traffic management and security will help reduce operational cost. And that’s what Tetrate’s products, including an Envoy Istio mix, will help to solve, according to Talwar. Envoy Gateway was announced as a new expansion last year.

The reason is that it’s getting harder to troubleshoot microservices overall as it proliferates, according to Talwar. The expansion of containers, in part, is because Kubernetes has become easier to develop.

“But as a result, what is happening is that more things are getting broken down, so there is more network in-between,” he explained. “Harder it gets to troubleshoot, harder it gets to secure everything, harder it gets to get visibility from everywhere.”

Tetrate is the solution, he claims. It was formed to enable enterprises to adopt Istio and Envoy and functions as a platform on top of Istio “to make it usable in deployment in a large enterprise,” he said.

Where do the elements play in the picture? The Envoy proxy is used to mediate the traffic for services in the service mesh.

“The Envoy proxy takes care of distributing certs, encrypting everything, and that is what leads to consistent application operations,” Talwar said. “And that’s where the value is.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event. Red Hat Inc., the main sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, Tetrate.io Inc., or other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE