At scale, an enterprise faces integration configurations involving Kubernetes (K8s), service meshes, third-party tooling, and complex infrastructure. The management and governance of these configurations, particularly in a Zero Trust environment, present significant challenges. Misconfigurations often lead to security vulnerabilities and governance issues, making it crucial to maintain configurations effectively. We call this the configuration complexity issue, which poses a major hurdle in IT operations.
Over time, the IT industry has developed solutions to manage integration and configurations. These have evolved from hard-coded data to value-managed configurations, rules engines, and ultimately to Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). DSLs offer engineers flexibility and the ability to manage complex environments. However, as configuration complexity grows, DSLs become increasingly difficult to maintain and understand, especially when proprietary DSLs are involved. The effort spent managing DSLs can often match the effort required for maintaining hard-coded configurations, bringing enterprises back to square one. This creates the Configuration Complexity Clock (CCC) issue.
Enterprises are increasingly integrating from traditional software environments to more dynamic, cloud-native architectures. In these environments, applications themselves become the network, consisting of distributed workloads connected via APIs across multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures. As a result, the configuration complexity becomes overwhelming and unsustainable. Businesses are now searching for a solution that provides an intuitive, transparent, and scalable application network management framework.
This framework must be able to automatically adapt to the increasing scale and complexity of the infrastructure, without requiring significant manual intervention. The goal is to simplify configuration management and ensure enterprise-wide security and compliance in a constantly evolving digital landscape. A robust solution will help enterprises reduce configuration complexity and avoid the pitfalls of misconfigurations while enhancing their security posture.