The United States Air Force (USAF) signed a contract with cloud-native application and networking security vendor Tetrate to enhance the federal agency's security posture through a zero-trust security model based on the service mesh Istio and Envoy proxy.

The $1.75 million services and support contract addresses what Tetrate Federal Director Branden Wood described as the biggest IT issue impacting government organizations: maintaining secure environments. Using the Tetrate Istio Subscription (TIS), the USAF can "lock down not only the user access, but what applications can communicate with one another," Wood told SDxCentral.

The USAF is implementing TIS in support of Platform One, which is a managed cloud services platform owned and operated by the USAF and available for use by any federal agency transitioning to the cloud.

The Istio service mesh is open source and available to organizations without going through Tetrate, but Wood touted the TIS offer as a unique value-add compared to the standard version of Istio. For example, Tetrate partnered with the Istio team to add features and functionalities that earned the subscription service a FIPS 140-2 certificate, which Wood said "ensures all encryption we're providing has been certified by NIST."

TIS also offers enhanced support for federal agencies. "If you're utilizing open source, the community is only going to support you for usually two to three months," Wood said. But with Tetrate's Istio subscription, "we want to support you for about 12 to 14 months, depending on the number of revisions that come up. It's a pretty good value-add over typical upstream open-source Istio distribution," he argued.

While various open-source service meshes exist on the market, Tetrate's gravitation toward Istio was natural. "The godfathers, the creator of Istio is really our DNA inside of Tetrate," Wood said. Tetrate cofounder Varun Talwar and founding engineer Zack Butcher were originally part of the Istio team at Google, and cofounder JJ Jeyappragash "was doing the same thing over at Twitter," Wood noted.

Beyond Tetrate's history with Istio, Wood said the service mesh stands out in the market "as a tight coupling in relationship with Envoy. Not only do you have a service mesh out there, you actually have a sidecar out there that can do things on your behalf as part of the service mesh, which I think makes it that much more compelling," he explained.