A10 Networks introduces Multi-Cloud Secure Service Mesh Solution for Kubernetes

A10’s Secure Service Mesh is the first solution of its kind to protect east-west traffic and transparently encrypt traffic between microservices without requiring changes to those applications. The result is a higher level of security and performance for microservices-based applications.

“With the Secure Service Mesh solution, A10 continues to deliver on its promise of intelligent automation and security for both modern multi-cloud and traditional infrastructure,” said Lee Chen, Founder and CEO of A10 Networks. “Organisations are turning to containers for their production applications to become agile and scalable in meeting the demands of digital transformation. The A10 Secure Service Mesh is a significant advancement for these environments.”

A10 Lightning ADC, a containerised and lightweight load balancer and proxy, is the primary component providing load balancing and security capabilities. It works in an active-active cluster which is elastic and scales up/down automatically with the scale of a Kubernetes cluster. The same Lightning ADC cluster can be used for both North-South as well as East-West traffic.

"While Kubernetes addresses challenges relating to application build and deployment, organisations still face the daunting and often time-consuming challenge of reliably delivering runtime security and performance assurance in containerised microservices environments that will only become more complex as they grow,” said Brad Casemore, Vice President of Research for Datacentre Networks, IDC. “A10 Networks understands the considerable value that its customers can derive from microservices, and that is why it has extended its portfolio with the Secure Service Mesh, providing application traffic-management capabilities that address the need for heightened security while reducing the operational burden on application teams deploying runtime Kubernetes applications.”

The security solution between microservices includes enforcing micro-segmentation policies for traffic between the services. The system can also automatically encrypt traffic between services, further increasing the privacy and security of those communications. Additional security capabilities include rate-limiting application traffic to each service, application DDoS and SSL/TLS offload.

The Secure Services Mesh solution includes the A10 Harmony controller, which provides multi-cloud, centralised policy management and also comprehensive metrics, logs and analytics providing 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 capabilities in the A10 Secure Services Mesh include automatic service discovery, health monitoring, load balancing, URL/content switching, and support for Blue-Green or Canary deployments.

None of these capabilities requires any change to the actual applications and can be completely automated under the control of the operations teams. This lowers the operational burden as the microservices applications scale in usage and complexity. The A10 Secure Services Mesh solution is tightly integrated with container management systems like Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift.

“For applications deployed in a Kubernetes environment, east-west traffic security is a prime concern,” said Kamal Anand, Vice President of Cloud, A10 Networks. “The A10 Secure Service Mesh elegantly addresses security concerns without imposing any specific deployment model or requiring any changes to applications. Per-service, application-layer traffic analytics greatly help operations teams to optimise the application as well as infrastructure and enhance the security and delivery of their application.”