5 months as a Field Engineer

Five months already! I feel like it’s only been five weeks or so!
What happened since I’ve left the Airbus juggernaut and joined this forward-thinking startup called Solo.io?
Well, I’ve learnt a lot about Envoy!

That’s it, thanks for reading me :)
More seriously, I’ve been working as a Field Engineer and… excuse me?
What is a Field Engineer?
Well, not sure if there is a standardized definition, but we are primarily technical experts (especially with Kubernetes in our area). We are doing some pre-sales consulting, enablement, support and talks.
Here is an overview of my activities over the last few months to give you a better idea. I’ve…
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met dozens of prospect interested in our cloud native solutions
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facilitated more than 10 hands-on workshops with the community
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been helping more than 20 European (+ Israeli 👋) customers (support on slack)
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produced 3 small videos for mastering Gloo Edge
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written 3 blog posts for advanced use cases with Gloo Edge
The three videos on Youtube:
The three blog posts:
Next? Mesh, mesh, mesh!

From now on, I’ll try to focus on Istio and on our management plane solution, called Gloo Mesh.

Management plane?
If Istio acts as a control-plane for sidecar proxies, then Gloo Mesh acts as a management plane for multiple clusters running Istio. |
And, because I’m sure you want to know more about it, here are the main benefits of using such a product:
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hybrid service-mesh connectivity, with a simplified API, making cross-cluster policies just easy (traffic management, access policies, etc.)
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automatic endpoint discovery with Gloo Mesh agents, reporting to the management plane
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centralized metrics and logs for your different clusters
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fine-grained RBAC for Ops. You control who can target which workload with which kind of policy (TrafficPolicy, AccessPolicy, AccessLogs and more)
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identity federation (ie. one common root CA, signing intermediate CAs for your clusters, themselves signing workloads identities, aka. SPIFFE)
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WASM support
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Enterprise Istio support, until N-3
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FIPS compliant builds
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supports flat networks
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works on OpenShift, EKS, GKE, AKS, IBM and vanilla Kubernetes!

One step ahead
Also, we’re working on a fully managed platform, called Gloo Cloud. This means that we take care of the management plane for you. You log in with your enterprise credentials and you manage cross-cluster policies from there! in other words: Istio as a Service.

If that makes sense to you, then drop us a message on Slack! We’ll be happy to help!
EDIT 08/28: we have changed our plans. We will focus on top-notch technologies. More announcements during the next ServiceMeshCon! |