Solo.io Celebrates First Anniversary of Istio Ambient Mesh

Joint Solo.io-Google Effort Revolutionizing the Landscape of Distributed Environments in First Year

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 07, 2023 – Solo.io, the leading cloud-native application networking company, today celebrates one year of Istio Ambient mesh. Co-developed by Solo.io and Google and introduced on Sept. 7, 2022, Ambient mesh is the new Istio dataplane architectural alternative that does not rely on sidecars by default. Instead, it allows customers to have choices around the vectors of cost, operational transparency, and performance.

This first-of-its-kind contribution is the culmination of nearly a year of engineering effort that began within Solo.io, and merged together with Google. It builds on 5+ years of experience in the Istio community, with thousands of production deployments and contributions from nearly 1,000 engineers.

As the founders of Istio Ambient mesh, Solo.io plays a significant role in all aspects of the project. In January 2023, Solo.io became the first company in the industry to support Ambient mesh in its commercial product, Gloo Mesh. With the addition of Ambient mesh, Gloo Mesh brings forth the best of Istio security without compromise, including management for Kubernetes clusters, microservices, and virtual machines with support for sidecar-less and sidecar-based Istio deployments in parallel.

“As the landscape of enterprise environments continues to diversify, incorporating an array of patterns, technologies, and platforms, the role of a mesh solution becomes increasingly indispensable for securing, connecting, and monitoring communications,” said Louis Ryan, CTO of Solo.io. “Istio has consistently led the charge in this arena, pioneering critical innovations like mTLS and zero-trust communication. Building upon this legacy, Ambient mesh is poised to establish a new benchmark for mesh solutions. At Solo.io, we remain steadfast in our commitment to providing our customers with choices tailored to their organizational needs. Ambient mesh offers an efficient architectural paradigm, unparalleled simplicity, heightened security, and superior performance, making it the optimal choice for a wide spectrum of users.”

Istio Ambient Mesh is a reflection of the feedback provided by the Istio community on how they deploy service mesh to enable microservices applications. The new architecture addresses several challenges the Istio community faced, by improving the performance of applications that use a service mesh, reducing the compute/memory overhead resources required for a service mesh, simplifying on-going operations of the service mesh, enabling greater flexibility for applications that do not always require full Layer 7 services from the service mesh, allowing multi-tenancy applications using the service mesh with the full flexibility of both high performance and high security, and addressing the modularity of future technologies that may be incorporated into the service mesh.

Within the first year, Istio Ambient Mesh code was merged into Istio’s main branch and was also included in the release of Istio 1.18 in June 2023.

To learn more about Istio Ambient mesh, visit www.solo.io/products/ambient-mesh/.