Cloud Field Day–Solo.io #CFD6

October 14, 2019 Leave a comment

As I mentioned, I was in Silicon Valley a couple of weeks ago for an analyst event, and got to meet with a variety of the companies. The final company we met with on Friday, was Solo.io, and I have to say they knocked it out of the park. Their technology was super interesting and their founder Idit Levine, and their CTO, Christian Posta were excellent presenters who were clearly enthusiastic about their product.

So what does Solo.io do? In the modern microservices oriented world, we have distributed systems which are nearly all API driven. Solo.io has a number of products in this space, but their core product Gloo is a modern API gateway that securely bridges modern applications like Lamba or Azure functions to both legacy monolithic applications as well as modern databases running in Kubernetes pods.

They also have another open source project called SuperGloo, which is an abstraction layer for service mesh architecture. A service mesh provides modern applications with monitoring, scaling, and high availability through APIs rather than discrete appliances. Istio from Google is best known tool in this space, and SuperGloo can work with it, and other service meshes in the same architecture.

The other really interesting tool that Solo.io highlighted was called Squash, which is a debugger for distributed systems. If you’ve ever tried to troubleshoot a distributed system, even figuring out where to start can be challenging. By acting as a bridge between Kubernetes (drink) and the IDE, you can choose which pods or containers you are debugging and set breakpoints, or change variables during runtime.