Availability of Mizu – Techstrong TV

UP9 announced the availability of Mizu, an open source API traffic viewer for Kubernetes maintained. Mizu helps developers troubleshoot problems and quickly get to their root cause in Kubernetes applications by unpacking all microservice communication with support for modern protocols that are commonly used in such applications, like REST, gRPC, Kafka, Redis and RabbitMQ. The video and a transcript of the conversation are below.

Recorded Voice:         This is Digital Anarchist.

 

Alan:                           Hey everyone, welcome to another segment here on Techstrong TV. Happy to be joined by my friend Alon Girmonsky returning to us here at Techstrong TV from UP9, Up9. Hey Alon, how are you?

 

Alon Girmonsky:         I’m doing good. Doing good, Alan. Thanks for having me.

 

Alan:                           My pleasure. It’s nice to see you in an office it looks like there, with a whiteboard and a door and very industrial looking. That’s a sign of the times. Good for you.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         I’ve been waiting, all of us, for more than two years to get back to an office environment.

 

Alan:                           Yeah, absolutely. Hey, Alon, before we jump into today’s news, which I think is exciting, let’s just make sure – Of course, you’ve been on our show many times, we’ve covered UP9, but there are people out here who are not familiar. Why don’t we give them a little UP9 story and maybe a little of your background?

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Sure, sure. So let’s start with UP9 and then kind of go to my background. UP9 is a new company that me and my team have founded over the past couple of years. And it’s all about microservices. Microservices API is the new era of cloud native. I think we can all agree that cloud native is basically changing everything there was before cloud native and then there is the future. So we are focusing on enabling microservices developers to develop quickly, find problems and go to market faster.

 

Alan:                           Yep. And just by way of introduction and background, you, of course, were also the founder of BlazeMeter, open-source based testing that was quite by a CA Technologies Broadcom. And then spun out and acquired by Perforce most recently, and still providing great service of value.

But really the key I want to bring out from that, Alon, is that your involvement in the open source community runs deep, your roots run deep here. The businesses you’ve been involved with have been just really intertwined with the open-source community. And as such, there are people who understand that when you’re working as a commercial entity with the open-source community, it’s a symbiotic relationship.

It’s not a parasitic relationship where it’s all take, take, take. It’s symbiotic. One helps the other and they help each other. And that of course is the key to success with open-source business models and so forth. And you are a walking billboard for that success. So congratulations on that.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Thanks.

 

Alan:                           That kind of brings us though to today’s announcement. Why don’t you, if you don’t mind, share with the audience?

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Yeah, yeah. By the way, I always wanted to be a billboard, but –

 

Alan:                           A walking billboard.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         And a walking billboard.

 

Alan:                           Oh my God.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Yeah. But you’re correct. So my previous company BlazeMeter, and again, it’s the same team from BlazeMeter – Over the years, we’ve developed or contributed to several open-source projects. Many of them became the most popular ones in their field. Back then it was JMeter and Taurus, and WireMock.

And today it’s basically the announcement of a new open-source project named Mizu. I’m a true believer that open-source – 10 years ago, open-source was the deployment solution, the free option when you compare it to the commercial bells and whistles, commercial offerings.

But if we fast-forward the past 10 years, two things have happened. First, developers have become far more important to today’s organizations and developers consume open source. There is a specific reason for that. Open-source is the most tangible experience you can get. I want it now, I can download it and run it now.

I don’t need to go through hoops, through sales people, through sales processes to actually experience any product that I’m using. Vendor dependency or lack of, the absence of –When you adopt open-source, it’s like an insurance policy, where I can use it. And if I like the vendor, great, if not, I can still stick with the open-source.

The thing is that if open-source is the best way to start a relationship with a new vendor, ’cause there’s no dependency, it’s very quick to trial and use, open-source is becoming the first-class citizen in software development. So companies, I think, this is my personal belief that over the years have invested a lot in open-source far more than in the past.

If in the past it was backed by organizations like Apache and other kind of nonprofit organizations, today open-source is being backed by vendors. So, almost every open-source project has a company behind it. And there are certain rules you cannot bypass, you cannot put Trojan Horse or something that will trap people to use your service.

It’s a true project that provides full value, but probably usually there is additional commercial value if you adopt an enterprise version and such. Okay. So again, this is kind of my theory around open-source. And as we said, today I want to introduce Mizu, right?

 

Alan:                           Mm-hmm.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         And Mizu has a funny story to it, or a cute story to it. It’s kind of I wish I want to say, hey I woke up one morning or one of team members woke up one morning and they had this great idea that ended up being Mizu. That’s not the case.

 

Alan:                           Very rarely is. Okay.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Yeah. We were developing something in one direction, building a lot of technology, a lot of intellectual property to it. And then we saw where people get excited, which came in surprise to us. And I’m gonna show Mizu in a second so you’ll know more about what I’m talking about.

But what led to this new project is the fact that people got so excited about certain use case. And we said, “What’s going on here? This is a commodity. This is not something important.” Then we realized in the cloud native environment, in Kubernetes environment, this capability is absent. It’s not there. A capability that was one.

And the capability is basically being able to troubleshoot an application by simply viewing the traffic, inspecting the traffic. We used to do it so many times in the past. Every developer remembers right-clicking the Chrome dev tools and seeing the network traffic using Wireshark, using tcpdump, Feedler, other tools that give you what’s going on inside the traffic, what’s the API payload, to find the needle in the haystack. When you go into Kubernetes, that doesn’t exist.

 

Alan:                           Yeah.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Right. And we said, “Okay, that’s cool. Why don’t we, if there is a specific use to this? And we want to serve, we want to provide value. If there is specific use only for that to being able to see traffic, where currently you can’t, let’s carve this piece of technology from a big product, package it as a standalone tool and contribute it to open-source with an Apache license to use so it’s true open-source and everyone is able to use it.

 

Alan:                           Yep. But it begs the question. Why wasn’t there something for Kubernetes? What is specific about Kubernetes that made this such a must have? And the answer in my mind is it’s the way the microservices – When you talk about Kubernetes, you’re running them in a container environment, whether it’s serverless or whatever, it’s a container environment, Kubernetes is the orchestrator.

So you have all of these containers. And in many cases, it’s really what it is as microservices. And you have all these microservices running, but they’re dependent on each other in terms of timing, functionality, everything else. And that communication – Microservices architecture versus a monolith.

I mean, the complexity, especially it’s one thing you got two microservices, five microservices. All right. But when you got dozens, let alone hundreds, it it’s a job. It’s not something, it’s a job. Quite frankly, Kubernetes can be difficult to deal with as you know. I suspect that’s why we probably haven’t seen any sort thing like Mizu here that can tackle this.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Yeah. I think you got it exactly right. I think that cloud native and Kubernetes specifically, both introduce new set of challenges. And think about what happened in the past couple of years, the introduction of cloud native was very quick. Very surprising.

It took Amazon and the public cloud 10 years from 2008 to somewhere in the past decade to become standard defacto. And we thought Kubernetes will take yet another 10 years, but no.

 

Alan:                           Three years.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Exactly. It’s simply there.

 

Alan:                           I’ll give you a better one. Look, you’ve been around a long, think back, when was the first time you saw hypervisors, VMware or –

 

Alon Girmonsky:         [Crosstalk]

 

Alan:                           – some of the open-source. Yeah, it was late 90s.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Yeah, yeah.

 

Alan:                           You didn’t really see it. Well, 2005, we started seeing cloud. And then there was this whole public versus private cloud thing, but really we were talking about hypervisors, whether it was private or public, and whether it was VMware. I mean, look, VMware was a shootout from EMC.

It wound up being bigger. But it wasn’t until around – It took almost 10 years for the hypervisor to become a dominant sort of platform. And without the hypervisor, you wouldn’t have cloud, right?

 

Alon Girmonsky:         I couldn’t agree more. Yeah.

 

Alan:                           Yeah. But that was probably cut in two thirds in Kubernetes. Two thirds faster, 66 percent faster. And now, I mean, the last numbers I saw, 75, 80 percent of all new payloads on Amazon or Kubernetes space. Instances, not payloads. Instances.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         I agree. I further agree with you, very much unique for this time that the one thing that kind of pushed everything super-fast forward is actually COVID in 2020, right?

 

Alan:                           Mm-hmm.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         It’s either you are digital –

 

Alan:                           Or you’re dead. And I don’t mean it in a bad way.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Yeah. Okay.

 

Alan:                           I mean, enough people died, unfortunately. We were talking off camera, but it’s true. But here’s the thing, and I’ve been in technology a long time. Yes, COVID was a great accelerator. But just because COVID leaves up or we go back to some new normal, doesn’t mean we’re gonna turn the clock back. It accelerates and we go from there. We go from there.

Alon, we don’t have all day as much as I’d love to talk to you all day. One of the knocks always on open-source tools is how easy is it to use? What kind the interface does it have? Can I use it? Do I need to buy the enterprise version, or can I use the, the open-source?

If you don’t mind, I’m gonna ask you if you could pull up maybe a screenshot, not a screen, if you can log in, whatever, whatever you want to do best, show us what Mizu is about

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Alan, soon you’re gonna ask me for a PowerPoint deck. This is not how [crosstalk].

 

Alan:                           No, I don’t want a PowerPoint. The world sees enough PowerPoints.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         No, no. Of course, of course.

 

Alan:                           Let’s go in.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         But I’ll show you in a second. And while I’m sharing my screen and getting ready to present, let’s discuss the alternatives. Okay?

 

Alan:                           Right. I just wanna mention before we go, we didn’t rehearse this or anything. I hope I haven’t put you in a bad spot, Alon. Forget, discuss the alternatives.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Listen, it’s the most fun spot I am. Things need to work. It can be a perfect storm.

 

Alan:                           Okay. It’s like TV, right?

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Exactly.

 

Alan:                           So we’ll do it.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         I wouldn’t have it any other way. But lets think about API observability, a theme we both like very much. So today, to understand what’s going on inside your cluster, you have to instrument code with other tools. You have to use either an SDK or instrument code. Therefore you need a developer to do that.

And the more services you have, the bigger clusters you have, the more developer time you need. Any code requires maintenance, and the list goes on. It impacts scalability. Okay? Okay. Here comes Mizu. Let’s say I have a clean slate, I just heard of Mizu. I’m going to this open-source project of UP9.

And then I’m going to the release page to download. So I’m copying this one line. And remember, there was nothing before, no developers are here. You don’t see any code editor. I’m going to my console and I’m pasting the command I just copied from the website and I’m running it.

Behind the scenes, this downloads a small utility that communicates with the Kubernetes APIs. So there’s no installation. Exactly, the entire operation is by communicating with Kubernetes and asking Kubernetes to allow us to listen in to the network layer. Okay. That would be kinda the first thing.

So I just download it. I haven’t installed anything and I’m running it. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. This is a live demo. Okay. It communicates with Kubernetes, it found Kubernetes. These are the pods. You see the UI that opens up. Okay. You actually see 45 pods are being tapped. You act on the left.

 

Alan:                           Wow.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         This is the traffic. This is the real traffic that goes inside Kubernetes. Okay?

 

Alan:                           Huh. Let’s just be clear. We’re not on a third party site. We’re not acting anyone here.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         No, no, no.

 

Alan:                           No. Okay.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Every Kubernetes cluster –

 

Alan:                           I don’t want us all to go away for this, Alon.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Don’t worry about it. No, I’m running my own Kubernetes cluster still in GKE. Okay?

 

Alan:                           Okay.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         And I’m using Mizu, the open-source tool that I’ve downloaded to communicate with that cluster. Ask to tap in to the network level. As you can see, there are multiple protocols here. There is obviously the HTP protocol. I can see the request. I can see the response. There is Kafka trying to get a request, a response. What else do we have? A AMQPs, RabbitMQ. Okay. Redis.

 

Alan:                           Mm-hmm.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Okay. So what it does, not only that it taps the network layer to extract the traffic, the packets, it also deciphers the packets and basically decrypt any encryption that is there, and unpacks any language, sorry, any protocol that is there. Okay. Obviously modern protocols. So this is kind of the basic capability of Mizu. Everything is in real time, as you can see, no [crosstalk].

 

Alan:                           Wow.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Any number of services, like this time around, I have 45 different services, but if my cluster will to have 450 or 4,000 –

 

Alan:                           [Crosstalk].

 

Alon Girmonsky:         – if I had multiple clusters, I can easily go in and, and see everything or see only a chunk of it. I can further – Let’s say, I want to find something. There’s a lot of traffic here. Think about kilobytes or traffic. Let’s say I want to find all the API entries of a certain API. So I’m pressing the plus here. See. And then I want with response status 200.

 

Alan:                           Mm-hmm.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         I want to see only those. So now I’m seeing only those APIs.

 

Alan:                           Right.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         And here’s a quick trick. Let’s do 400, here. So now I will find only those with 400. Obviously I don’t have any, but if at any point in time I would have a faulty API, I would see it here.

 

Alan:                           Excellent.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Okay.

 

Alan:                           Excellent. And this is the total free version, no tricks, no, nothing. This is what people get when they download just this little plugin and use the free open-source version.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         So a couple of things. First, definitely yes. You just saw the entire thing. It’s kind of, this –

 

Alan:                           There’s no smoke and mirrors.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         No smoke. The only thing is, there are more, there is more, like this thing.

 

Alan:                           But wait, there’s more. Okay.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         See. These are –

 

Alan:                           Wow.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         – service dependencies –

 

Alan:                           Nice

 

Alon Girmonsky:         – as they are inferred from traffic.

 

Alan:                           And this is also the open-source version?

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Everything I just presented is pure open-source.

 

Alan:                           All right. Just wanna make sure.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Yeah.

 

Alan:                           Beautiful. All right. So where do people go to get this?

 

Alon Girmonsky:         They can go to two places. They can go to GitHub, to UP9 Mizu. They can simply, the best way to do it, because you don’t always remember. What I usually do to find, I type in Kubernetes. Traffic viewer, for example. And here it is.

 

Alan:                           Very cool.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Yeah.

 

Alan:                           Very good. Excellent man. And it’s available now?

 

Alon Girmonsky:         It is available now. We’ve just released the latest and greatest few hours ago. So you can get all of this if you go to the website now. As you can see, it’s Apache license, which means you can do whatever. You see quite a few people fork this project. So they take it, they use it, they do whatever they want with it.

 

Alan:                           They’re gonna do with it. Good for this.That’s a beautiful thing. Thank you, Alon. Not only thank you for being on the show, thank you for showing this to us, but thank you and the UP19 for making this available to everyone. This is a valuable tool, arsenal. Look, one of the hottest things we’re seeing right now on the security side of things at Security Boulevard, API security.

Everybody’s talking about API security. Companies raising hundreds or millions of dollars for API security. The key to API security is knowing what APIs you have, being able to manage your APIs. At some point, I think when the market matures, API security will be a function of API management.

API management means you’re also securing your APIs. It’ll be part of that. So a feature rather than a standalone. But but this is fantastic and it’s open-source. It’s free to people out there. Go check it out. Alon, thank you again. Appreciate it.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         It’s always a pleasure. And thanks for having me. And I’m looking forward to meet again sometime soon.

 

Alan:                           Hopefully in-person soon. That’s what I’m looking forward.

 

Alon Girmonsky:         Definitely.

 

Alan:                           Alon Girmonsky, CEO, founder of UP9 here on Techstrong TV. Go check out Mizu, here is the shot of it. You can get it on GitHub. You can search as he did, as Alon did here. You saw it here first on Techstrong TV. We’re gonna take a break, we’ll be right back.

 

[End of Audio]

 

Alan Shimel

As Editor-in-chief of DevOps.com and Container Journal, Alan Shimel is attuned to the world of technology. Alan has founded and helped several technology ventures, including StillSecure, where he guided the company in bringing innovative and effective networking and security solutions to the marketplace. Shimel is an often-cited personality in the security and technology community and is a sought-after speaker at industry and government conferences and events. In addition to his writing on DevOps.com and Network World, his commentary about the state of technology is followed closely by many industry insiders via his blog and podcast, "Ashimmy, After All These Years" (www.ashimmy.com). Alan has helped build several successful technology companies by combining a strong business background with a deep knowledge of technology. His legal background, long experience in the field, and New York street smarts combine to form a unique personality.

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