Solo.io extended its cloud-native application networking platform with Gloo Fabric, which represents interdisciplinary multicloud networking capabilities that haven't been brought to market before, Solo CEO Idit Levine told SDxCentral.

Before the complexities of technologies like Kubernetes and containers began complicating enterprise networking, the cloud-native and application networking ecosystems were more separate. Levine described the former as “the way we did networking until today,” citing industry stalwarts like Palo Alto Networks and Cisco. But with little “change in that market for a long time, there's no innovation in networking, per se,” which has remained focused on connectivity, observability and security.

The cloud-native ecosystem, however, has leveled up thanks to service mesh technologies like Istio or Linkerd, which simplify management and policy enforcement for Kubernetes clusters. But a significant challenge remained – connecting more than one cluster. “And that's something that Solo did,” Levine said, referring to the vendor's Gloo platform, which in its previous iteration combined API gateway, service mesh, security and cloud-native networking into one application networking platform.

While Solo found plenty of enterprise users impressed with those capabilities, applications aren't confined to running in clusters. Think virtual machines (VMs), multiple public clouds, serverless infrastructure like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda or on-premises data centers. The new question became, “how am I bringing all that story together? This is exactly what Fabric is attacking,” Levine explained.

And no one else has been able to approach cloud-native application networking like this before due to the interdisciplinary nature of the challenge. “We've got all these different people who are specialists in different things. We need them all to work together,” Solo Product Marketing Manager Doug Chamberlain explained.

“That's the idea of making sure that you have a way to have all these things communicating securely together [and] operationally working together. The end users should never see all this complexity that's going on behind the scenes,” he said.

Gloo Fabric arrives at an important time because customers are experiencing a “mind shift” that isn't aligned to what many vendors are doing, Chamberlain noted, and “the customers are saying the options out there really aren't working.” To that point, Fabric provides what Solo describes as a vendor neutral experience.

Customers want to realized the unique benefits of different cloud platforms while utilizing existing investments in on-premises architecture, and Gloo Fabric helps mix that together and ensure multiple vendors stay involved, Chamberlain said.

“When you think about what's out there today, you have these siloed approaches that say, yeah, you can have something in the public cloud, in the private cloud, but it's going to be tied into a specific vendor,” whether with VMs or something more Kubernetes-centric “like a Red Hat OpenShift solution where, again, it's tied to a specific vendor. They have to be involved in the entire process.”

Vendor lock-in also rings true with cloud providers that offer cloud tools and services in customers' on-premise environments, which leaves the customer “stuck in [the provider's] view of the world,”Chamberlain said. “One vendor's going to rule the world, whether it's going to be managing or bringing something that they do in the cloud on-prem,” he argued.

But with Solo's Gloo portfolio, the vendor looks at “how we deliver Gloo Mesh” to ensure “we're still doing a lot of that stuff that's generally at the Kubernetes layer, but also introducing a lot of what's happening to blend the public cloud and private cloud networking pieces together in a way that it's very easy to discover and follow when something moves,” Levine noted. “This is the beauty of kind of using that declarative model [and] saying this is what it will look like at the end regardless of how it all comes together.”