DEVOPSdigest

Tetrate announced that Istio service mesh and Envoy proxy now support the Arm Neoverse platform.

Arm is a provider of processor IP and its designs have enabled more than 215 billion chips. Neoverse support enables widely used open source software projects to run faster, with less energy usage and lower total cost of ownership.

Neoverse is available on a wide range of cloud environments and for large-scale data center environments. Neoverse implementations include AWS Graviton2 processor-based Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which offer a price/performance improvement of up to 40% over comparable x86-based instances.

“The diversity of applications is rapidly changing, and Arm is addressing the growing need for increased performance to take on compute-intensive workloads like service mesh,” said Bhumik Patel, director of ecosystem development, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “By partnering with Tetrate to add Istio and Envoy support to Neoverse based platforms, we can bring better application performance, reduced energy consumption and lower TCO to customers of this industry-leading service mesh software.”

Neoverse is particularly well suited for complex workloads such as machine learning, AI, and now, service mesh. For example, AWS previewed Amazon EC2 instances powered by next-generation AWS Graviton3 processors, which will provide up to 25% better performance for compute-intensive workloads compared to current generation instances powered by Graviton2. AWS Graviton3 processors will deliver up to 2x higher floating-point performance for scientific and machine learning workloads, and will provide 50% higher memory bandwidth versus Graviton2-based instances to improve the performance of memory-intensive applications like scientific computing.

“We at Tetrate are seeing larger and more complex service mesh deployments that demand innovative solutions for meeting SLAs cost-effectively from edge to the cloud,” said Saptak Sen, vice president of Strategic Alliances at Tetrate. “We are proud to work with Arm, AWS, and the rest of the Envoy and Istio communities to help our customers in government, finance, ecommerce, and other markets make their mesh implementations more consistent, flexible, and scalable.”

Istio is a service mesh, and Istio software includes an extended version of the Envoy proxy. Tetrate is optimizing Istio and the Envoy proxy for performance. Neoverse supports these efforts and gives a solid boost to Istio and Envoy performance. Accelerating these software projects also yields higher performance when running Tetrate’s industry-leading service mesh management software, Tetrate Service Bridge.

Istio service mesh, accelerated by Arm Neoverse on multiple platforms, supports a number of benefits important to government and industry:

- Security. Service mesh performs authentication, authorization, and encryption/decryption on every communication among service instances and with the control plane, enhancing security. Neoverse speeds the necessary processing, including numerical processing for encryption and decryption.

- Agility. Service mesh supports rapid software development using continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) approaches. Neoverse provides a platform for accelerated performance, which can be managed and enhanced across software updates.

- Business continuity. With service mesh, architects can create applications that can fail over from on-premises to cloud, from one availability zone in the cloud to another, and even from one cloud to another. Neoverse support is available on all these platforms, giving applications consistent performance optimization across all deployment targets.

Those interested can download Arm-ready versions of Istio from Tetrate Labs. Options include a FIPS version, compliant with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2, Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules. And the number of options for accessing Istio running on Neoverse across multiple platforms is large and growing.