Integrated security, analytics, and flexible load balancing are now available for direct and managed traffic between various microservices.
A10 Networks (NYSE: ATEN), an Application Visibility Performance and Security company, introduces the new A10 Secure Service Mesh solution for applications available in the open-source Kubernetes container management and orchestration system. The solution gives teams of experts using microservice-based applications the ability to increase the level of security across microservices by adding specific functionality. Secure Service Mesh also provides comprehensive visibility and analytics into application behavior.
A10 Secure Service Mesh is the first solution on the market that can secure east-west traffic by transparently encrypting traffic between microservices, without requiring application modifications. The result is a higher level of security and high performance for your applications.
“With the Secure Service Mesh application, A10 delivers on its promise of intelligent automation and security for today's multi-cloud infrastructures as well as traditional ones” – says Lee Chen, Founder and CEO of A10 Networks – “Organizations are turning to the container orchestration and management system so that their production applications become agile and scalable in responding to the new needs dictated by digital transformation. A10 Secure Service Mesh represents a significant advance in these environments.”
A10 Lightning ADC, a lightweight containerized load balancer and proxy, is the core component that provides security and load balancing capabilities. The A10 Lightning ADC works according to an up-down and elastic active-active cluster, i.e. a load distribution system, fully automatically and at the scale of a Kubernetes cluster. The Lightning ADC cluster can be used for both north-southbound and east-westbound traffic.
“While Kubernetes faces the challenges of building and deploying applications, organizations today still face the difficult, and very often expensive, challenge of ensuring runtime security and performance assurance in containerized microservices environments, which will become more and more complex as they expand.” – declares Brad Casemore, VP Research Datacenter Networks of IDC. “With A10 Networks realizing the significant value customers can derive from microservices, they have extended their portfolio with Secure Service Mesh, providing application traffic management capabilities that address the need for increased security while reducing operational load. on teams implementing Kubernetes runtime applications.”
For what concerns security between microservices, the solution includes the application of micro-segmentation policies for traffic between services. The system can also automatically encrypt traffic between services, further increasing the level of privacy and security of such communications. Finally, additional security features are provided, which include traffic rate limiting applications for each service, DDoS application and SSL / TLS offload.
The Secure Service Mesh solution includes the A10 Harmony Controller, which provides centralized multi-cloud policy management as well as comprehensive metrics and log analytics that provide actionable insights for each microservice. These analytics include end-to-end transaction latency, throughput, request rate, and other real-time and historical metrics.
Traffic management features in A10 Secure Service Mesh include automatic service discovery, health monitoring, load balancing, URL/content switch, and support for Blue-Green or Canary deployments.
None of these features require any changes to the actual applications and can be fully automated under the control of operations teams. This results in a reduction in operational burden as microservices applications are scalable in terms of usage and complexity. The A10 Secure Service Mesh solution integrates seamlessly with container management systems such as Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift.
“For applications deployed in Kubernetes environments, securing east-west traffic is a priority,” says Kamal Anand, VP Cloud at A10Networks. “A10 Secure Service Mesh solves security problems easily, without imposing any specific application deployment models or requiring changes to them. The traffic analysis service at the application layer greatly helps the operations teams to optimize it and make the entire infrastructure even more efficient, as well as increase the security and distribution of the application itself.”
