Calico Cluster Mesh Simplifies Microservices Integration
Tigera has added a Calico Cluster Mesh to its portfolio that ensures low-latency networking across multiple clusters.
Based on open-source Project Calico software that enables Kubernetes workloads and non-Kubernetes or legacy workloads to communicate with other computing resources and entities. Calico Cluster Mesh delivers the benefits of a service mesh without the added complexity and latency of a traditional service mesh solution with its configuration and maintenance burdens.
What Does Calico Cluster Mesh Fix?
But why is deploying a “traditional” service mesh hard work, troublesome and fraught with complexity? Much of the answer lies in the significant skills and resources required for service mesh configuration, operation and maintenance. Implementing a service mesh introduces additional components and complexity, such as sidecar proxies, control plane components and the need to manage configurations and policies. This might increase the learning curve for teams and require new skills or expertise to manage the service mesh effectively.
In light of where a service mesh gets us thus far, Tigera appears to have aligned Calico Cluster Mesh as an answer to the frustrations and difficulties that result from the extensive use of microservices. While the use of microservices provides scalability and more open paths to application maintenance, enabling communication between microservices often requires developers to get their hands dirty with custom code, which can result in misconfigurations and severed connections between application dependencies. Calico Cluster Mesh provides a route to simplified communication at this level but without the operational burden of a service mesh in the standard way.
“Calico Cluster Mesh empowers today’s IT and security teams with the capabilities they need to achieve their goals, without adding complexities or costs,” said Amit Gupta, chief product officer, Tigera. “Tigera’s lightweight service mesh approach, delivered through Calico Cluster Mesh, reinforces our dedication to providing simple, scalable, cost-effective solutions.”
Service Mesh Machinations
Gupta suggests that today’s cloud developers and site reliability engineers (SREs) need solutions that streamline working in complex microservices environments without adding additional products, steps or complexity.
With Tigera’s approach, Calico provides the capabilities to address the security and observability challenges organizations face without the overhead of a bespoke service mesh solution.
With Calico, users can easily achieve full-stack observability and security, deploy highly performant encryption and tightly integrate with existing security infrastructure like firewalls. Calico enables a single-pane-of-glass unified control to address the three most popular service mesh use cases: security, observability and control.
Calico Cluster Mesh hides network complexity and simplifies service connectivity for developers. The lightweight service mesh provides robust workload connectivity that works with flat, cloud, or hybrid networks and eliminates network changes with a choice of TOR or Overlay VXLan networking. Additionally, cross-cluster networking is simplified with DNS connectivity.
Cross-Cluster Dependency Visualization
Regarding operational use, developers using microservices at this level can visualize workload communication and application dependencies across clusters. They can troubleshoot service-to-service communication more quickly, identifying security gaps and enforcing network security controls.
The promise of cloud, but cloud with fewer instances (occurrences, not spun up instances in this case) of complexity with dependency controls, service connectivity enablement tools, abstracted functionalities where appropriate and centralized observability with troubleshooting capabilities is a big plate of cat food to serve up, but that’s what this cat says is for dinner.
