Tetrate’s Istio-based Service Express service mesh is now generally available on AWS

Service mesh specialist Tetrate today announced that Tetrate Service Express (TSE), the company’s service mesh solution for Amazon’s EKS container service, is now generally available. TSE combines Tetrate’s Istio-based service mesh solution with a zero-trust security solution that helps users manage how their services talk to each other and outside services.

Tetrate’s focus on Istio as its service mesh solution of choice is no coincidence. The well-funded company was co-founded by Varun Talwar, who was the founding product manager for Istio during his time at Google, and Jeyappragash JJ, who previously ran Twitter’s cloud infrastructure management platform.

Image Credits: Tetrate

In addition to TSE and its Istio distribution, Tetrate also offers the Tetrate Service Bridge, which helps very large enterprises connect, monitor and secure microservices. And while Tetrate Service Bridge offers support for multi-tenant operations, Tetrate Service Express offers many of the same features but with a focus on single-tenant operations.

“We have a portfolio of products now,” Talwar told me. “The reason we are excited is that this [launch] completes our product portfolio. You can think of it as crawl, walk, run” — where the ‘run’ part is Service Bridge and the ‘walk’ part is Service Express.

Service Express is now available in the AWS Marketplace. Talwar argued that it should take only a few minutes to set up an Istio-powered service mesh on EKS with this solution. It’s integrated with AWS’s Route 53 to make it easier to deploy applications in multiple regions, as well as Amazon’s Load Balancer Controller and Network Load Balancer, Managed Grafana and Amazon Private Cloud Certificate Authority.

As Talwar told me, AWS’ size made it a logical starting place for Tetrate, but he also noted that Google, having initiated the Istio project (together with IBM and Lyft), made this service mesh a core part of its platform, whereas AWS and Azure were “late to the party,” as he put it (and Microsoft previously launched Open Service Mesh, a competitor to Istio).