Volterra has beefed up their VoltMesh service by adding load balancer, API gateway and web application firewall capabilities that will serve every cluster with centralized management and with end-to-end policy control and visibility.
Mark Weiner, Volterra’s CMO
Santa Clara CA-based Volterra has announced the expansion of capabilities on VoltMesh, the service on their cloud platform that provides high performance networking and zero-trust security between multiple clouds and edge sites. The new enhancements add the capabilities of point products like load balancers and API gateways within a SaaS based single stack with centralized management, in order to address the operational challenges of distributed cloud-native applications.
“Today, as apps get modernized, they move from being monolithic to being jigsaw puzzles, with apps in small components,” said Mark Weiner, Volterra’s CMO. “That changes how you develop them, secure them and connect them. That impacts legacy services like load balancers, because in responding to these changing apps, we need to take these legacy techs along a very cutting edge, which is how we are enabling them to evolve.
“Everything is about APIs going forward,” Weiner stressed. “It changes how apps run as well as the infrastructure to do it. Legacy infrastructure for monolithic apps doesn’t cut the mustard any more.”
The shift to a world of microservices and API creates a new set of problems however, in ensuring that these are fully secure and managed.
“There are latency and performance issues around APIs when apps are in one or more clouds,” Weiner said.
Arkur Singla, Volterra’s CEO
“There are many scenarios like when a U.K. banking user in Singapore is redirected back to U.K., with latency the result,” said Arkur Singla, Volterra’s CEO. “Microservices were not made for this kind of traffic and app workload.”
“Security is also harder for DevSecOps which doesn’t have the proper security tools,” Weiner noted. “Existing network microsegmentation security tools are is hard to work with zero trust, because APIs are all encrypted and go over one port in the firewall. You need security at the API level.”
Distributed workloads also require a dedicated set of infrastructure point products like a load balancer/ADC, API gateway, web app firewall [WAF] for each cluster.
“You need a global load balancing solution or traffic manager for these environments because they weren’t built for distributed modern apps,” Singla emphasized.
This is what the new announcements around VoltMesh have been designed to provide, addressing many of the operational challenges of distributed cloud-native applications by consolidating multiple networking and security services into a single SaaS-based offering.
“We are taking the cutting edge of old tech and adding in new ones in a pure SaaS based manner,” Weiner said. “No others have integrated all of these in a SaaS based single stack with centralized management with end-to-end policy control and visibility as we are doing here.”
Instead of implementing a separate load balancer, API gateway and WAF for each cluster, VoltMesh now allows DevOps to provide all these services at every cluster with centralized management, end-to-end visibility and policy control.
“The AI and machine learning-based API security is very advanced and lets you do automated zero trust at the API level,” Weiner noted. “It auto-discovers APIs across all the clusters, and enables policies to whitelist required APIs, to provide API security as developers build modern apps.”
In addition to being deployed in clusters across multiple cloud providers, Voltmesh can also be enabled within Volterra’s global application delivery network to secure and accelerate application performance.
“Our global app delivery network – lets us deliver things closer to the user in the same way that CDNs [Content Delivery Networks] deliver static content,” Weiner said. “Many of the CDNs are also going into edge computing, but they are doing it serverless or in other ways where developers have to learn new stuff. It’s a lot simpler for use cases the way we do it, because going to a new way of building apps is a long haul. We make it easier to run apps like Kubernetes which are the future.”
The upgraded VoltMesh service is available today as a free software download for base users with two multi-cloud clusters, and as a paid enterprise subscription for larger footprint or globally-distributed deployments.
