Simplified Application Networking

Organizations are increasingly reliant on distributed applications and leverage microservices architectures to revolutionize application development and deployment. Smaller services offer a lot of scalability and agility, but connecting an ever-expanding number of applications, APIs, and services results in a massive number of configuration files that quickly turn into a nightmare to run and maintain and can lead organizations down the path of fragility.

Service meshes are intended to address this challenge, and they work well when you have one or two services. However, when deployed in large-scale production environments service meshes fall short because they introduce another layer of management, another layer of configuration and, therefore, additional 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-performant, 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 the data breaches occurring, 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 focus has been to provide a platform that simplifies application networking with a comprehensive suite of tools that enable resiliency, scalability, and agility. Building on service mesh to add more capabilities while eliminating the configuration nightmare, we are now considered the top provider of service mesh capabilities according to GigaOm⁴. Looking to the future, Gartner® has already included us in their Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking as a vendor within a next-generation service mesh category dubbed service connectivity layer (SCL). The SCL goes even further than service mesh using automation tools to simplify and optimize how microservices and applications interact and enable features such as discovery and cataloging across the entire network. But it can still create complexity.

Greymatter as addressing these limitations as we drive the next era of multi-cloud application and microservice management with our simplified, leading application networking platform.

Figure 1. The Greymatter Application Networking Platform

Our unified application networking platform does the hard work of extending service mesh and modern service connectivity with all the additional technologies required to simplify control, security, and visibility across today’s hybrid, multi-cloud environments, including:

Control: Greymatter simplifies configuration management by leveraging GitOps to manage application networking as code and enable attribution and version control, enhancing developer efficiency while handling the minutiae of network and security plumbing under the covers. Revolutionary playbooks and automation reduce boilerplate config by over 1000%.

Secure: An industry leading identity mesh fabric and our 100% NIST-compliant zero-trust controls helps enable Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA), consolidating your security policies and enforcing them across your entire application network, without writing a single line of 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 and 100+ out-of-the-box automation defaults quickly surface insights.

Built on the four cornerstones of what an application networking platform should be, the Greymatter ANP plays a central role in ensuring modern applications can communicate effectively, securely, and reliably across all environments they need to – virtual machines, cloud service providers, and Kubernetes clusters. And it helps drive down costs through automation and adherence to GitOps.

At Greymatter, we believe that the role of an application networking platform, ultimately, is to make life in today’s hyper-dynamic world easier. We’re here to help you free developers to focus on building great software by automating the burden of service connectivity, performance, and security and to enable your business with insights for better, 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/