Enterprise Envoy Gateway – Varun Talwar, Tetrate

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Welcome back here to techron tv.

You know, we were at CubeCon just a week or so ago, and wow, what a great event It was at CubeCon in Chicago this year. I think it was about 9,000 people in person, 12,000 people all together or something in that range. But, you know, no matter how long we are working and recording at CubeCon, there's just never enough time to see and meet with all of the people we want to meet with.

This next gentleman was someone I really wanted to get to at, at CubeCon, and we couldn't make it happen, so I brought him on here. This is, you know, right after CubeCon. I want to introduce you to Varun Twar.

Uh, Varun is the co-founder and CEO of a company called Tetra. And first of all, Varun, welcome to Textron tv. Thanks, and thanks for joining us to be here.

Absolutely. Hey, before we jump into everything else, just real quickly, a lot of people out here didn't have the pleasure of attending CubeCon in Chicago. So before we jump into anything else, what did they miss?

What did, what were your impressions of this year's CubeCon? I think CubeCon for me was, uh, better than what I expected. Lots of good conversations, um, both pre-planned as well as impromptu corridor, you know, hallway conversations.

Mm-Hmm. Um, I think I could feel that this time there were more, uh, business people, uh, in the conference. Like, it was less about like, how does this work?

But it was more about like, so what's your differentiator and why should I buy you? Uh, which is actually an interesting, uh, thing for us, because, you know, that's a sign of maturity. Yeah.

Like, uh, as much buyers as, uh, learners, you know? Yeah. Um, so, And as, as ACEO of a company, I think you wanna know, I mean, that's a good thing for you, right?

Absolutely. No one absolutely wants to be a missionary all the time. You know, the old saying, right?

The missionary carves the path in the jungle with the machete, and then the other people just walk through a clean path right. To, to where they're going. Yeah.

We've, I've been, you know, running Tet Trade for five years, and we've, we've done the what is this thing and how does it work for five years? So it's good to see this. Absolutely.

So, Varun, you mentioned, you, you're, you, you're running Tetra five years. You're CEO co-founder. Give us a little bit of your background, if you don't mind, a little bit of your journey to Tetra and what you've been doing since then.

Yeah, happy to do it. So, um, I, uh, was at, uh, Google for, before I started teade. Uh, I've always been a product manager person, a product person.

Um, and I spent almost 12 years at Google in different parts. Uh, first with, you know, core search and maps, then media, and then infrastructure and Google Cloud. Um, I actually started, uh, the project, uh, Istio, uh, the service mesh Project Istio at Google as the product manager on it.

And, uh, wow. So we including, you know, coining the term, defining the project, launching it out with partners and, and, and so on. Um, and prior to that was also responsible for, uh, donating GRPC as a product manager to CNCF, uh, which is another, you know, microservices communication project in CNCF and very widely used as a alternative to rest APIs for, you know, internal services.

I love it. That's impressive. Very Impressive.

That started this, uh, in March of 2018, which was almost, um, you know, seven to eight months after the launch of tio. And here we are. I love that.

I, what a great story. So tios had a, an interesting path to the marketplace, right? It, it, I mean, when I first started going to, uh, CubeCon, I, I guess the first one was I went to, was up in Seattle.

I want to say maybe it was Austin, I don't remember. But you know, when, when it's deal burst on the scene, you just felt like service mesh was gonna explode, right? Service mesh was gonna rule, because I mean, yeah, you had your Kubernetes and orchestrating your, your containers, but in terms of dealing with the outside world and the rest of the world, you know, that mesh was where security was gonna live and, and identity and, and, you know, API integrations and everything, it was all right at that mesh.

And that to me was gonna be the focal point I thought of, of cloud native. I think it took a little time for it to, to percolate to mature, right? But the last, in Amsterdam, I don't know if you were in Amsterdam for, uh, cube Con in Amsterdam, and now again in Chicago, I really got the feeling that service mesh and Istio in particular has kind of hit their stride, right?

Uh, and, and exactly the conversations is not, what is it? But I could do service mesh through, there's a lot of service mesh solutions out here. Why, why yours?

And why, you know, why is this TO versus, you know, any of the other, and there are several CNCF projects, right? With mesh. Um, what makes this one better, worse?

What's the use case? What's the advantages? So I, I agree.

We are, we have moved beyond the, what is it, what does it do, do, which is the right one for me, sort of conversations. Let's talk about Tet rate now. So you launched about five years ago, and you, I guess I'm gonna assume Tet rate has kind of lived through this evolution, maturation of, of service mesh, uh, you know, in the market.

And then you also, um, you guys also work a lot with Envoy, so not just in Istio. For those of our audience who may not be familiar with Envoy, make 'em smart. Yeah, no.

So I mean, just a quick 32nd on, you know, these projects and how they're layered. Um, Envoy is a cloud native proxy, uh, which works for L four two L seven. It's the CNCF project.

That's the data plane proxy that Istio uses. Istio can be thought of as a control plane for all those en y proxies inside a Kubernetes cluster. And, um, so that's how these things are layer if you, if it's the first time you're hearing about these, um, in terms of competition and choices and adoption path, um, it is absolutely, I was in Amsterdam, I think I've been to probably every cube coupon since it started, and probably even the ones where it was being conceptualized.

Mm-hmm. So yes, service mesh and overall the space of like Kubernetes networking is the focal point for a huge part of cloud native community and customers, right? And it's not surprising, right?

Like, like you, you get comfortable with Kubernetes concepts, you start spinning up more and more workloads and more and more clusters. The more clusters you do, the more you start dealing with, like, how do these things communicate with each other, and how do I make them connect? And, and no cluster is sitting in an island, right?

They're all talking to something here, something in cloud, something back in data center. So it becomes a focal point for all of those people. Now, um, the more strategic and focal it is, the more people want to participate from both from vendors, uh, point of view.

So you will see a lot of choice, which is actually not a bad thing. Uh, so, you know, Linkerd has been A-C-N-C-F service mesh project. Um, and then, uh, I think, um, HASI with council has started to get into service mesh with Council Connect.

Uh, there's a bunch of players that are coming into this space. Istio was the thought leader, and by far, uh, you know, way ahead in its sort of thinking process and roadmap when it launched. So, and it had the backing of Google and all of these players.

So it sort of advanced ahead, uh, way ahead. Then many of the implementations and, you know, given the support of Google and, uh, both technologically and marketing wise, it advanced the most, right? Mm-Hmm.

So, um, obviously I'm biased. Uh, I do think, um, still did a decent job and is the most mature, uh, out there. I think a lot of people will agree.

I think what you'll hear a lot is, um, you know, how to adopt and complexity, and those are the questions that we help address as STA rate, right? So TTR as a business has, uh, uh, you know, few offerings. One is just, we just help people to get successful with SIO o.

So that's just, um, an open SIO o distribution help in like upgrades and FIPs bills and, you know, longer support and CVS and so on. So that we see as quite popular. A lot of people take that and get their feet wet, get successful, get into production, and then start expanding from there for people who are more advanced in their journey, like who have a lot of clusters and a lot of STO deployed everywhere and want to now are ready to expose it to application teams and different business units and teams and how to consume and how to do, um, day two operations with it.

We have an enterprise platform, uh, which we call TE Trade Service Bridge, and that's our second offering. So as a company, we have those two offerings. Um, the third one we are gonna talk about today, which is a newer one, which is the Enva Gateway one.

Excellent. Before we go any further for people who just, you know, sunk that all in and said, I, you know what, let me go check out something on the website and see more about this website is Tetra. com?

I forget io. Yep. T-E-T-R-A-T-E.

Alright. Yes, I think we've set the table. So you guys made some announcements at CubeCon.

Well, one announcement, you made a CubeCon, and then since CubeCon, you, you've done an announcement that I think you've already, you know, intimated that on the, on the, uh, gateway. But why don't we start with the Cube Con news, if you don't mind, and, and we'll go from there into, into Gateway. Yeah.

I'll leave the two are connected, so I'll mm-Hmm. Sort of continue our narrative from there. So, you know, one of the first things you do once you have a Kubernetes service up and running is, uh, expose it for someone to use it.

Sure. You know, and that process has always since, you know, four, five years, um, or since actually Kubernetes started, it's been deploy an ingress controller and expose it to the outside world. Now, Kubernetes community came up with, started to feel gaps in ingress.

Like it wasn't enough in terms of what people wanted to do, like, uh, and about three to four years ago, they started re-looking at what's the next in ingress. And, you know, they, they went back, they did their user's research, they did their design work, and year and a half later came out with Gateway, API as the answer to what's next for Ingress? Mm-Hmm.

So now, uh, the way to standardize spec that Kubernetes is recommending is Kubernetes Gateway, API. Um, so that's what obviously everybody in the community wants to use. Um, and the other aspect while this was happening was Envoy came into the scene and became this popular cloud-native like proxy of choice.

So as an end customer, what you wanna do is like, yeah, I wanna use that, which is feature rich and powerful, and I want us be aligned by the standardized spec that community is saying. And surprisingly, that's not easy, or it wasn't easy before, because I don't think It's surprising. Go ahead.

Um, it's so what, on about AY year ago, we said, uh, we'll bring the community together and take the standardized spec and implement it on top of Envoy and do it in a way that people do Kubernetes. So when you do Kubernetes service, you just write, uh, a Kubernetes, uh, uh, in like, uh, gateway, API the way you write Kubernetes services, it's built on, on y it's easy, it's native, it's like part of the workflow. So Envi Gateway came about as a project from where we combined the community around on Y and Gateway, API, and we took like VMware Ambassador Labs and, um, even some end user companies like Fidelity and so on as into the mix to say, let's do this in upstream open source Envoy.

So there are no choices that people have to make in terms of, should I use a product for this? Should I use a vendor fork for this? Because there was a lot of confusion out there, um, because everyone was trying to do their own version of it, and nothing was in upstream Envoy as a project.

Right? So the significance of Envoy Gateway is three things. It's, uh, free, powerful, and standardized.

Free as in it's, uh, part of upstream Envoy project. 0. Right.

0 from Kubernetes, this cube con you may have heard about while there. Mm-Hmm. So hence Ony Gateway is making a lot of sense.

A lot of companies are jumping onto the bandwagon, and we think it will become the facto way of exposing services in Kubernetes. Like, uh, uh, so it's a significant step forward. That is, um, you know, a year ago in CubeCon we had said, we are doing this, but it wasn't done.

It was, the implementation wasn't there. Now it's there and ready and being used. And, uh, not only that, uh, so TEG coming back to Tetras offering is basically a supported commercial offering off on Y Gateway.

Got it. Yeah. Right.

So, Um, is, is there, I mean, besides support training and all the usual stuff that we'll see with that is, is there sort of freemium premium features on top of what you might get from the, you know, from the pure open source offering? Or are there plans for that going forward? Maybe, Yes.

What's true standard things are there in terms of support and FIPs and experience and all that, which are on packaging, but we are also having additional things like, um, you know, making simple things very easy. Like, like OAuth for example. Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm.

Who, who doesn't, like everybody will take incoming traffic and say, yeah, I want these applications to do SSO or ops before traffic comes in. Everybody wants to do that. Like, why is that not super easy to do?

You know? And um, so things like that, it'll make, uh, a little bit more simpler. It is also adding things which are a bit further out, but things like WAF and web application firewall, uh, as a part of, like, if you wanted to do those checks as part of the incoming traffic into this proxy, you can do that as well.

Right. So those are some of the planned advanced things, um, as part of, uh, tetras offering. And, um, I think it's new.

We are looking forward to how that adoption goes. Well, we're gonna have to have you come on and tell us how it's going. And I, I'm gonna assume you're gonna be in Paris in March and let, let's try to make sure we get on, you know, do it at the show in Paris, but don't wait till March to come back.

Varun, keep us posted. Okay. Absolutely.

Looking forward to that, Alan. Yeah, I'll, I'm sure Robert and I will keep you posted on things happening here. Absolutely.

Varun Talwar co co-founder CEO at Tet Rate, go check out their new Tet rate Enterprise Envoy Gateway, which is, as Varun said, a commercially, uh, commercially supported version of the enterprise. io is the website. We're gonna take a break here on Tech Drunk tv.

We'll be back in a second.