Ambient Mesh: No Sidecar Required

At Cloud Native Security Con, we sat down with Solo.io's Marino Wijay and Jim Barton, who discussed how service mesh technologies have matured, especially now with the removal of sidecars in Ambient Mesh that it developed with Google.

Ambient Mesh is "a new proxy architecture that, according to the Solo.io site, "moves the proxy to the node level for mTLS and identity. It also allows a policy-enforcement policy to manage Layer 7 security filters and policies.

A sidecar is a mini-proxy, a mini-firewall, like an all-in-one router, said Wijay, who does developer relations and advocacy for Solo. A sidecar receives instructions from an upstream control plane.

"Now, one of the things that we started to realize with different workloads and different patterns of communication is that not all these workloads need a sidecar or can take advantage of the sidecar," Wijay said. "Some better operate without the sidecar."

Ambient Mesh reflects the maturity of service mesh and the difference between day one and day two operations, said Barton, a field engineer with Solo.

"Day one operations are a lot about understanding concepts, enabling developers, initial configurations, that sort of thing," Barton said. "The community is really much more focused and Ambient Mesh is a good example of this on day two concerns. How do I scale this? How do I make it perform in large environments? How can I expand this across clusters, clusters in multiple zones in multiple regions, that sort of thing? Those are the kinds of initiatives that we're really seeing come to the forefront at this point."

With the maturity of service mesh comes the users. In the context of security, that means the developer security operations person, Barton said. It's not the developer's job to connect services. Their job is to build out the services.

"It's up to the platform operator, or DevSecOps engineers to create that, that fundamental plane or foundation for where you can deploy your services, and then provide the security on top of it," Barton said.

The engineers then have to configure it and think it through. "How do I know who's doing what and who's talking to who, so that I can start forming my zero trust posture?," Barton said.