Vendors’ Private Cloud Offerings Hinge on Microservices and Serverless Success

C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• Microservices will get a boost from growing vendor adoption of Istio (service mesh), Envoy (distributed proxy), and MicroProfile (microservices portability).
• Serverless computing is receiving more attention stemming from vendors’ OSS projects, including Knative and CloudEvents.

This summer has seen a raft of activities in OSS projects aimed at easing configuration complexity and furthering adoption around emerging DevOps architectures including microservices and serverless computing. The most notable OSS technologies shoring modern application development/deployment methods are Istio (service mesh) and Knative (serverless), projects spearheaded by Google and others. Yet, rival projects are emerging, promising to throw a wrench into the mix, such as Oracle’s efforts around CloudEvents, now backed by CNCF. Another competitive threat lies in the potential for disruption brewing among little-known startups offering their own pure-play versions of service mesh and serverless technology to developers and software engineers in the form of easy-to-use SaaS offerings.

When Cloud-Based Security Can Mean Everybody Wins

J. Marcus

Summary Bullets:

• Software-defined networking is turning concern about security in the cloud on its head, enabling a winning model for protecting businesses.
• Enterprises get predictable cost and value, security vendors streamline go-to-market and service delivery, and network providers gain revenue from vendor partners by hosting ecosystems in a B2B2B role.

Protecting a business network has traditionally meant plugging in a bunch of different security ‘appliances,’ in each business location, to protect all the many different devices and machines connected to the LAN or WAN. Managing the process can be a nightmare for companies of even a modest size, to the point where many often simply give up.