Cool Networking, 2021 Style

It is that time of the year; cool vendors. While there have been lots of uncool things over the past ~15 months (including #covidhair), we’re excited to publish Cool Vendors in Cloud Networking.

Simply put, networking coolness is about solving customer’s challenges in new and innovative ways. This year we focused specifically on vendors doing cool cloud networking stuff because the native networking capabilities within public cloud and/or Kubernetes environments can fall short, particularly for production enterprise workloads. This gap is not always addressed by established networking vendors, thus I&O networking leaders should look to emerging cool cloud networking vendors.

This cool vendors report profiles Infiot, Isovalent, Traefik Labs, and Valtix, and we also take a retrospective look at former cool vendors Aviatrix (just received a big funding round) and Volterra (acquired by F5 last year)

• Isovalent helps to improve the performance, visibility, security and scale of Kubernetes networking, by injecting security and logging capabilities directly into  low levels of the Kubernetes stack. This is enabled by eBPF (a blog for another day…) which Isovalent is helping to drive.
• Infiot combines “thin-branch” SD-WAN and ZTNA to support multiple remote access scenarios, with a disruptive pricing model. The vendor has broad coverage for IoT, edge, branch and remote-first usage scenarios.
• Traefik Labs (Formerly known as Containous) combines several networking capabilities designed for cloud-native environments that customers would otherwise have to integrate from a varied set of open-source and/or commercial options (i.e., API management, ingress control and service mesh as a unified proxy).
• Valtix provides comprehensive network security for workloads in the public cloud (AWS, Google and Azure), including inbound/.outbound, east/west and as a reverse proxy for application protection).

Also, in case you’re wondering the status of cool enterprise networking vendors of years’ past, here you go

regards, Andrew