F5 Networks has announced the launch of Aspen Mesh, an open public beta of its fully supported service mesh built on Istio.
As companies move to a model where applications are continuously developed and deployed, they are leveraging microservices to effectively build and manage them. However, this often adds complexity and de-centralises ownership and control, so companies are increasingly employing service mesh technology to ensure resiliency and uptime.
Many companies are adopting Istio as their service mesh of choice as it provides a toolbox of different features with a broad range of microservices capabilities. But some critical enterprise challenges remain, especially around monitoring, managing, and controlling microservice-based applications at runtime. In particular, enterprises need feature sets that address observability, policy, and security.
“Observing, controlling, and securing microservice-based applications can be a major challenge,” says William Fellows, research vice-president at 451 Research. “A service mesh provides a myriad of capabilities that make it easier to manage these containerized applications at runtime. Aspen Mesh simplifies service mesh implementation through engineering support and a fully tested and documented version of Istio that makes it easier to get all the benefits of a service mesh.”
“DevOps represents two teams, Development and Operations, coming together to deliver better products more rapidly. Service mesh is a glue that helps unite these teams and provides one place in the stack that you can manage microservices at runtime without changes to the application or cluster,” says Shawn Wormke, incubation lead at Aspen Mesh. “The result is a platform that empowers application developers to focus on their code and allows operators to more easily provide developers with a resilient, scalable, and secure environment.”
Aspen Mesh provides critical enterprise features in a platform built on top of Istio, so organizations enjoy the benefits of an open source approach without forgoing the features, support, and guarantees needed to power enterprise applications.
Specifically, Aspen Mesh builds on the Istio feature set by providing:
* Advanced policy and configuration options;
* Analytics and alerting;
* Multi-cluster/multi-cloud capabilities;
* An intuitive UI;
* A fully hosted SaaS platform; and
* Complete support from our team of service mesh experts.