Cisco Adds More Cloud-Native App Networking Projects

At the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference, Cisco unveiled an open source Nasp service mesh extender that enables a service mesh running on Kubernetes to integrate applications running on edge devices, legacy virtual machines and mobile clients.

In addition, Cisco has extended the scope of its OpenClarity projects to include an agentless tool—dubbed VMClarity—to detect and manage software bills of materials (SBOMs) for virtual machines running in a cloud-native environment.

Finally, Cisco also launched Media Service Mesh (MSM), an open source project that enables real-time media applications deployed on Kubernetes to run more efficiently. Kubernetes was originally designed to run web applications, so MSM addresses the need to run media applications in real-time on Kubernetes clusters.

Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of emerging technologies and incubation (ET&I) at Cisco, says all three projects are part of a growing suite of open source initiatives that address a range of networking and security requirements within cloud-native application environments.

For example, Cisco previously made available a project for securing application programming interfaces (APIs) using a service mesh, dubbed APIClarity, a tool for detecting and managing software bills of materials (SBOMs) and vulnerabilities in container images and filesystems, dubbed KubeClarity, and a command line interface (CLI) tool to invoke a verification function that can be used on serverless computing platforms, dubbed FunctionClarity.

VMClarity is essentially an extension of KubeClarity that enables IT teams to employ the same agentless capability to detect and manage SBOMs and vulnerabilities on both Kubernetes and virtual machines, noted Pandey. Cisco created the project because many customers are deploying Kubernetes on top of virtual machines in cloud computing environments, he says.

Cisco is launching these initiatives at a time when network operations are starting to converge with DevOps workflows. Historically, networking has long been a fiefdom run by specialists with their own insular culture. However, with the rise of service meshes that provide a layer of abstraction for connecting APIs, networking overlays are becoming truly programmable. Instead of having to wait for a network administrator to provision networking resources, it’s now possible for DevOps teams to programmatically manage network traffic using routing rules and policies to manage communication between applications.

It’s too early to say how quickly IT organizations are embracing service meshes, but as they are more widely adopted, IT leaders must decide if the service mesh is going to be managed by networking specialists that manage routers and switches or if networking services will be provided by a DevOps team that is managing the overall cloud-native application stack. Regardless of approach, a new era of application networking has arrived, driven by applications constructed using microservices and APIs.

The challenge, of course, is that those microservices not only need to connect to each other but also to a raft of other legacy applications running everywhere from virtual machines on a cloud to the network edge.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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