Ready for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2023?  Attending the show?  Make sure to visit with Tetrate.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon takes place November 6 - 9, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois.

Read this exclusive interview between VMblog and Devin Davis, VP of Marketing of Tetrate, the company bringing Istio and Envoy to the enterprise.

 

VMblog:  If you were giving a KubeCon attendee a quick overview of the company, what would you say?  How would you describe the company?

Devin Davis: Tetrate provides application networking and security solutions, powered by open source projects like Istio and Envoy. The company delivers a suite of products including service mesh and API gateway for enterprises increasing their rate of application delivery in multicloud and hybrid environments. As applications evolve into collections of decentralized microservices, monitoring and managing the network communications and security among those myriad services becomes challenging. This is why some of the largest financial institutions, governments and other enterprises rely on Tetrate to help them innovate with speed and safety.

VMblog:  Your company is sponsoring this year's KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.   How can attendees of the event find you?  What do you have planned at your booth this year?  What type of things will attendees be able to do at your booth? 

Davis: Attendees can find us at booth L12. We’ll be talking about the tech preview of our new Envoy offering. The new product provides a quick path to getting started with Envoy, and easy operations once in production. There will be popcorn at our booth and coffee just steps away, and we’re entering folks to win an e-bike if they come by for a chat.   

VMblog:  What do you attribute to the success and growth of the cloud native space?

Davis: The diversity of application use cases that the cloud native community of projects and professionals has made possible is breathtaking. In less than 10 years, the community has grown from Kubernetes to more than 150 different projects, all powered by open source licenses and open communities. The growth of the cloud native space is driven by a combination of the right idea (CNCF) at the right time (the acceleration of cloud adoption) and the right market circumstances (continuous differentiation powered by software). We're happy to be a part of it, providing zero trust architecture and gateway proxy solutions that simplify the consistent application of security policies to keep cloud native developers moving at the speed of innovation.

VMblog:  Do you have any speaking sessions during the event?  If so, can you give us the details?

Davis: We're co-sponsoring the Day of Security on Monday with Chainguard and Sysdig. The event includes technical sessions digging into Falco, Wolfi, and Istio open source projects. This free event is open to all participants, but pre registration is required.

Separately, anyone interested in zero trust should come hear one of the author's of the NIST standard on zero trust, Tetrate Founding Engineer Zack Butcher, talk about "Identity-Based Segmentation: An Emerging Standard for Zero Trust from NIST". It happens at 2:30 on Wednesday, November 15.

Zack will talk about how zero trust replaces implicit trust (perimeter security and network access) with explicit trust (identity and runtime authorization). This means authenticating and authorizing workloads in addition to end users, driving new patterns like identity-aware proxies and the service mesh for enforcing access. He'll talk about the NIST Special Publication 800-207A on a Zero Trust Architecture model for access control in cloud native applications in multi-location environments. His talk presents a succinct and easy-to-understand definition of a "zero trust architecture" and discusses how a common use case-application communication from cloud to on-premises through a DMZ-can be simplified with identity aware proxies (and policy!), leading to improved security without sacrificing organizational agility.

VMblog:  Can you double click on your company's technologies?  And talk about the types of problems you solve for a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendee.

Davis: The best way to address this is by providing a quick overview of the products–beyond the Envoy product we're launching on Tuesday.

With Tetrate Istio Subscription (TIS) users build their own service mesh deployment with the closest commercial product to the upstream open source Istio code, supported by the Tetrate team, which includes Istio co-creators. This product is a FIPS-verified Istio build with FIPS-validated open source crypto. It includes N-4 support from the current Istio version and Kubernetes compatibility testing.

Tetrate Service Express (TSE) is how users unlock service mesh value fast for agile teams on Amazon EKS. It provides quick installation on EKS, including native integration with AWS services like Route 53 and NLB and one-step encryption between services with mTLS. TSE is the only Istio-based service mesh to offer automated failover across EKS clusters and AWS regions along with an integrated view of metrics, events, logs and traces.

Tetrate Service Bridge (TSB) is our platform solution for service mesh technology, offering security, high availability and observability across any cloud and on-prem. Specifically designed for the most complex multi-cloud, multi-team, multi-environment organizations, TSB delivers enterprise-wide multi-tenancy with fine-grained access control by role. This product also automates policy enforcement by organizational hierarchy and automates VM onboarding.

VMblog:  While thinking about your company's solutions, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique?  What are your differentiators?  What sets you apart from the competition?

Davis: Our offerings are unique for three reasons. First, our engineering team helped create the core Istio and Envoy open source projects that our products are based on. Tetrate customers get support from people who know the underlying technologies inside and out. Second, our product are closely aligned with the pure open source projects they're based on. This gives our customer the confidence of knowing  they're protected from proprietary lock in. Finally, our products provide a rapid certification path for FIPS and FedRAMP certifications, which are table stakes for users in highly regulated industries.

VMblog:  Are companies going all in for the cloud?  Or do you see a return back to on-premises?  Are there roadblocks in place keeping companies from going all cloud? 

Davis: The rebound to on-prem is largely driven by cost management among companies with sufficiently deep operations capabilities that they can reliably run their own infrastructure, especially for workloads without a great deal of scaling needs or those that require very specific networking, security or audit standards that can best be achieved on prem. That said, the ongoing growth of public cloud services is not slowing appreciably, so we see opportunity in both areas.

VMblog:  The keynote stage will be covering a number of big topics, but what big changes or trends does your company see taking shape as we head into 2024?

Davis: The biggest trend we see in our space is the convergence toward a standard in zero trust. With the finalization of NIST publication 207A, anyone creating or operating software for the U.S. Federal Government has an approved zero trust architecture roadmap to follow. This removes uncertainty on which zero trust approaches will win out, and it gives vendors and developers a reliable standard to follow. As a result, we expect zero trust to gain in momentum throughout 2024.

VMblog:  Do you have any advice for attendees of the show?

Davis: Walk the marketplace floor and talk to people. You can learn a lot just by chatting up people at their booths that goes way beyond the products or services they're selling. KubeCon has evolved to become one of the most valuable networking events in our industry, so take advantage of that!

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