Organizations are increasingly reliant on distributed applications and microservices architectures to revolutionize application development and deployment. Smaller services offer scalability and agility, but connecting numerous applications, APIs, and services creates a massive number of configuration files. This can lead to maintenance nightmares and organizational fragility.
Service meshes are intended to address this challenge, and they work well when you have one or two services. In large scale production environments, service meshes fall short by adding another layer of management, configuration, and complexity. It becomes incredibly difficult to manage, secure and gain insights into how distributed applications are performing.
In fact, 94% of users have experienced security problems in production APIs over the past year1,
and 53% struggle with complex implementations for multi-cloud/hybrid environments2.
This is where an application networking platform comes into play.
Application Networking: The Backbone of Modern Application Delivery
When looking to implement distributed systems, features like scalability, fault tolerance, and insights into what is operationally running aren’t optional add-ons. They are essential to ensure systems remain high performing, secure, and successful.
At Greymatter.io, we view application networking as the backbone of modern application delivery. An application networking platform (ANP) defines the interconnections between services, APIs, and applications as they get deployed into your hybrid and multi-cloud environment.
Let’s look more closely at the cornerstones of an ANP:
Performance: Everyone wants their applications to perform better. Because the SCL is inherent to application networking this allows ANPs to help streamline traffic routing and provide load balancing which ultimately creates faster response times.
Scalability: These days the network is the application, meaning the connectivity across applications, services, and data is as important as the applications themselves. As your applications grow, your infrastructure around it should grow as well with seamless connectivity to all those capabilities at scale as they expand and retract.
Security: One-third of applications have at least one security vulnerability by the time they move into production, and 70% have security flaws after five years.3 Based on recent data breaches, we understand how impactful software security issues can be. ANPs are designed to mitigate those risks in a way that is very transparent to DevOps or the application teams: automatically discovering and pushing updates to deal with compliance issues.
Cost savings: Every organization is looking to save on the bottom line. An ANP delivers cost savings through a combination of automation and adherence to GitOps, for example being able to manage an entire fleet through a single configuration file. Simplification is the winner at the end of the day.
Why Greymatter
Our platform simplifies application networking with tools that enable resiliency, scalability, and agility. Building on service mesh, we’ve eliminated configuration challenges and are now a top provider, according to GigaOm. Gartner® has included us in their Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking, recognizing us in the next-generation service mesh category, the service connectivity layer (SCL). The SCL simplifies service interaction and enables features like discovery and cataloging, but it can still create complexity.
Greymatter as addressing these limitations as we drive the next era of multicloud application and microservice management with our leading Zero Trust Networking platform.
Figure 1. The Greymatter Application Networking Platform
Our unified application networking platform extends service mesh and modern service connectivity. It simplifies control, security, and visibility across hybrid, multicloud environments, including:
Control: Greymatter simplifies configuration management using GitOps to manage application networking as code. This enhances developer efficiency and handles network and security details. Revolutionary playbooks and automation reduce boilerplate config by over 1000%.
Secure: Our industry-leading identity mesh fabric and 100% NIST-compliant zero trust controls enable Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA). Greymatter consolidates and enforces security policies across your entire application network without writing code.
See: Insights into application performance, user actions, service health, anomalies, and resource consumption can help you make better business decisions. An Overwatch dashboard powered by our Catalog Registry of Apps, APIs, and microservices. Plus, Greymatter holds 100+ out-of-the-box automation defaults quickly surface insights.
Built on four cornerstones, the Greymatter ANP ensures secure, reliable communication across virtual machines, cloud providers, and Kubernetes clusters. It also helps drive down costs through automation and adherence to GitOps.
At Greymatter, we aim to simplify life in today’s dynamic world. We help developers focus on software by automating service connectivity, performance, and security, while providing insights for data-driven decisions.
Sources:
1Salt Labs State of API Security Q1 2023 Survey of over 400 industry-wide security, DevOps, and app development professionals
2Software AG Survey, February and March 2022; 1,150 respondents to Survey
3Veracode State of Software Security 2023 Report
4https://gigaom.com/reprint/gigaom-radar-for-service-mesh-237742-grey-matter/