Solo.io today introduced its Gloo Platform, combining API gateway, service mesh, security, and cloud-native networking into one application networking platform, which head of product marketing Brian Gracely touted as a “novel, new, modern innovation approach to” the service mesh and API gateway markets.

Solo, which Gracely described as “still a growing startup, but well funded,” aims to help its customers across modernize their Kubernetes operations, zero-trust security, and the evolving cast of microservices. “As Kubernetes has grown and as customers have become mature, that's really our core market,” he told SDxCentral.

The evolution of cloud native over the past five years has been focused on the growth of Kubernetes and the adoption of containers and microservices applications, which has lead to “a lot of really good things” like innovation, standards, and the ability to run applications consistently across clouds, Gracely noted. But “anytime there's new technologies and new things happen, there's always a follow up set of challenges.”

The main challenge he sees customers face is around what to do next. “What do I do now as I scale? As I have broader sets of teams involved with building these applications? Having to manage security, having to manage microservices sprawl, multicloud sprawl – we really focus on this new challenge,” he said.

This new challenge and era of problems to solve falls under a new category, according to Solo. “What we're calling this in terms of a space in the marketplace is really cloud native 2.0,” Gracely said.

The Gloo platform brings together the service mesh and API management spaces, but in “a much more integrated way than really anybody in the market has done at this point.”

“This is what everybody's talking about,” CEO Idit Levine added. “Even if they're trying to do this, and they do have a gateway and they do have a mesh, usually they are totally different. Maybe they build on different building blocks, and so on. I think that what's special about what we're doing,” she said. “The advantage of what we built here is that it will allow us to scale way faster.”

The platform integrates Solo's Gloo Gateway, Gloo Mesh, and Gloo Network products into a unified architecture with four main use cases in mind: cloud, zero trust, DevOps, and cloud-native application development. The platform enables organizations to deploy, operate, and secure open source community projects like Istio, Envoy, and Cilium, along with other apps or tools that run consistently and natively on any cloud or Kubernetes environment.

In terms of security, Gloo platform includes a zero-trust security model for deploying APIs and cloud-native apps. The platform also supports automation and GitOps, which aids developer productivity and helps maintain app compliance. Solo also noted it speeds up cloud-native app deployment and modernization while providing secure, scalable cloud environments that won't cause management headaches.

“Instead of thinking of these as distinct separate entities to manage and control and integrate with, we've built one unified control plane based around Istio for all components of this. We no longer have to think about scaling APIs one way [and] scaling service mesh another way,” Gracely explained.

The platform also touts “a support cycle that's [four times] what pretty much everybody else in the industry does,” he noted. This means the main burden of maintaining falls predominantly on Solo, and organizations spend “far less time having to care and feed for the platform than most things out there in the marketplace,” he said.

The core Gloo platform features are founded on four patterns of evolution Solo has observed. The first is the maturation of Kubernetes and its increased adoption, followed by the evolution from separate teams for development and operations to a DevOps engineering pattern, Gracely explained.

The third pattern is the simplification and standardization of service mesh, he said, citing last's month Ambient Mesh announcement with Google focused on simplifying what the Istio service mesh looks like. Solo's service mesh is based on Istio, and Ambient Mesh is a modernized architecture within Istio, Gracely explained. Pair that with Google's recent donation of Istio to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and “we think we're going to start to see more and more adoption in that space,” he said.

The final pattern is the merging of “what were two very distinct technology sets: service mesh and API management or even API gateway technologies,” he said, referencing work being done on the Kubernetes gateway API specification that will apply to Kubernetes and Istio. “As we look at all these things it really tells us these technologies need to be much more integrated,” he added.

Looking to the future, Gracely expects the rise of multicloud will prod customers to ask for deeper integrations with hyperscalers like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). “That space continues to evolve for us,” he said.

And “in the terms of the market itself, I think that what will happen is they're all going to follow as usual,” Levine added. “We like leading.”