Aviatrix Blog 
The early days of cloud were like the wild west – developers spun up test environments and created solutions on the fly to solve their problems. Eventually, as the center of mass and more business-critical applications shifted to cloud, IT and enterprise controls followed.
Today, we’re seeing Kubernetes follow the same trajectory. In 2022, 61% of companies were using Kubernetes, and another 30% had plans to in the next 12 months (Statista). IT and networking teams are now challenged with achieving the same level of visibility and control over containers as they have for virtual machines (VMs).
Visibility Challenges in the Kubernetes Network
Kubernetes abstracts away much of the information traditionally used to understand and control networks. While it does offer a new way to think about your network, this new way of thinking is generally incompatible with existing network tools and applications that don’t run on Kubernetes.
I recently penned a deeper dive article about this networking conundrum in The New Stack, but the general takeaway is this: There’s work to do to create a much-needed standard model for application networking that works as well for hypervisor and bare metal-based workloads as for Kubernetes.
Introducing Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall for Kubernetes
As a first step to solving this growing problem for enterprises, I’m happy to share that Aviatrix has introduced Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall for Kubernetes. This is a first-of-its-kind distributed cloud networking and network security solution for containerized enterprise applications and workloads.
Rob Strechay, Managing Director and Principal Analyst at theCUBE Research, summed up our solution well:
“While Kubernetes provides a robust platform for managing containerized applications at scale and container-to-container east-west communication, many enterprises run into control and operational challenges when also working with existing applications that don’t run on Kubernetes. Unlike other Kubernetes-specific network tooling solutions, Aviatrix enables operational efficiencies and simplifies security for both virtual machine or container-based applications that are currently deployed multicloud.”
Put another way, our goal is to make cloud networking for Kubernetes simple. We’re making updates seamless and automatic as apps scale. We’re elegantly mapping NAT needs and innovating with intent-based policy creation using native container identities.
See You at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon!
The Aviatrix team and I will be at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Paris from 19-22 March talking about cloud networking, connectivity, and Kubernetes. We’ll be demoing the new solution, Distributed Cloud Firewall for Kubernetes, at stand M14. And here’s an insider tip – if you sign up for a meeting with us, you’ll qualify for a free trial.
If you know me, you’ll also know I’m very involved in Istio, and currently sit on the Istio Technical Oversight Committee and Steering Committee. This year, that comes with a couple of perks in the form of stage time:
- Tuesday, March 19 | 11:30 CET – Delve into the future of Istio and the new Ambient mode with insights from me and the industry’s best at Google, IBM, and Solo in a live, interactive “Ask Me Anything” session.
- Thursday, March 21 |14:30 CET – I’ll be sharing hard-earned insights from Istio’s Ambient mode development – lessons only learned by facing down user rejection and channeling it into innovation. Don’t miss out on learning concrete strategies for transforming user feedback into a powerful tool for development and achieving true user-centric innovation in cloud technology.
Many trials and tribulations went into the lessons we’ll present at both of these sessions – I hope to see you there to share in them!
For those that aren’t attending KubeCon Europe, I did have a chance to share some of the insights we’ll cover there in a very special episode of the Altitude Podcast – talking all things open source and Kubernetes. Please listen in and let me know what you think. We’d love to hear from you!