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Google Cloud launches its Business Application Platform based on Apigee and AppSheet
Unlike some of its competitors, Google Cloud has recently started emphasizing how its large lineup of different services can be combined to solve common business problems. Instead of trying to sell individual services, Google is focusing on solutions and the latest effort here is what it calls its Business Application Platform, which combines the API management capabilities of Apigee with the no-code application development platform of AppSheet, which Google acquired earlier this year.
As part of this process, Google is also launching a number of new features for both services today. The company is launching the beta of a new API Gateway, built on top of the open-source Envoy project, for example. This is a fully managed service that is meant to make it easier for developers to secure and manage their API across Google’s cloud computing services and serverless offerings like Cloud Functions and Cloud Run. The new gateway, which has been in alpha for a while now, offers all the standard features you’d expect, including authentication, key validation and rate limiting.
As for its low-code service AppSheet, the Google Cloud team is now making it easier to bring in data from third-party applications thanks to the general availability to Apigee as a data source for the service. AppSheet already supported standard sources like MySQL, Salesforce and G Suite, but this new feature adds a lot of flexibility to the service.
With more data comes more complexity, so AppSheet is also launching new tools for automating processes inside the service today, thanks to the early access launch of AppSheet Automation. Like the rest of AppSheet, the promise here is that developers won’t have to write any code. Instead, AppSheet Automation provides a visual interface, that, according to Google, “provides contextual suggestions based on natural language inputs.”
“We are confident the new category of business application platforms will help empower both technical and line of business developers with the core ability to create and extend applications, build and automate workflows, and connect and modernize applications,” Google notes in today’s announcement. And indeed, this looks like a smart way to combine the no-code environment of AppSheet with the power of Apigee .
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Kong donates its Kuma control plane to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
API management platform Kong today announced that it is donating its open-source Kuma control plane technology to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Since Kong built Kuma on top of the Envoy service mesh — and Envoy is part of the CNCF’s stable of open-source projects — donating it to this specific foundation was likely an obvious move.
The company first open-sourced Kuma in September 2019. In addition to donating it to the CNCF, the company also today launched version 0.6 of the codebase, which introduces a new hybrid mode that enables Kuma-based service meshes to support applications that run on complex heterogeneous environments, including VMs, Kubernetes clusters and multiple data centers.
Image Credits: Kong
Kong co-founder and CTO Marco Palladino says that the goal was always to donate Kuma to the CNCF.
“The industry needs and deserves to have a cloud native, Envoy-based control plane that is open and not governed by a single commercial entity,” he writes in today’s announcement. “From a technology standpoint, it makes no sense for individual companies to create their own control plane but rather build their own unique applications on proven technologies like Envoy and Kuma. We welcome the broader community to join Kuma on Slack and on our bi-weekly community calls to contribute to the project and continue the incredible momentum we have achieved so far.”
Kuma will become a CNCF Sandbox project. The sandbox is the first stage that projects go through to become full graduated CNCF projects. Currently, the foundation is home to 31 sandbox projects, and Kong argues that Kuma is now production-ready and at the right stage where it can profit from the overall CNCF ecosystem.
“It’s truly remarkable to see the ecosystem around Envoy continue to develop, and as a vendor-neutral organization, CNCF is the ideal home for Kuma,” said Matt Klein, the creator of the Envoy proxy. “Now developers have access to the service mesh data plane they love with Envoy as well as a CNCF-hosted Envoy-based control plane with Kuma, offering a powerful combination to make it easier to create and manage cloud native applications.”
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Google details its approach to cloud-native security
Over the years, Google’s various whitepapers, detailing how the company solves specific problems at scale, have regularly spawned new startup ecosystems and changed how other enterprises think about scaling their own tools. Today, the company is publishing a new security whitepaper that details how it keeps its cloud-native architecture safe.
The name, BeyondProd, already indicates that this is an extension of the BeyondCorp zero trust system the company first introduced a few years ago. While BeyondCorp is about shifting security away from VPNs and firewalls on the perimeter to the individual users and devices, BeyondProd focuses on Google’s zero trust approach to how it connects machines, workloads and services.
Unsurprisingly, BeyondProd is based on pretty much the same principles as BeyondCorp, including network protection at the end, no mutual trust between services, trusted machines running known code, automated and standardized change rollout and isolated workloads. All of this, of course, focuses on securing cloud-native applications that generally communicate over APIs and run on modern infrastructure.
“Altogether, these controls mean that containers and the microservices running inside can be deployed, communicate with each other, and run next to each other, securely; without burdening individual microservice developers with the security and implementation details of the underlying infrastructure,” Google explains.
Google, of course, notes that it is making all of these features available to developers through its own services like GKE and Anthos, its hybrid cloud platform. In addition, though, the company also stresses that a lot of its open-source tools also allow enterprises to build systems that adhere to the same platforms, including the likes of Envoy, Istio, gVisor and others.
“In the same way that BeyondCorp helped us to evolve beyond a perimeter-based security model, BeyondProd represents a similar leap forward in our approach to production security,” Google says. “By applying the security principles in the BeyondProd model to your own cloud-native infrastructure, you can benefit from our experience, to strengthen the deployment of your workloads, how your their communications are secured, and how they affect other workloads.”
You can read the full whitepaper here.
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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation adds etcd to its open-source stable
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open-source home of projects like Kubernetes and Vitess, today announced that its technical committee has voted to bring a new project on board. That project is etcd, the distributed key-value store that was first developed by CoreOS (now owned by Red Hat, which in turn will soon be owned by IBM). Red Hat has now contributed this project to the CNCF.
Etcd, which is written in Go, is already a major component of many Kubernetes deployments, where it functions as a source of truth for coordinating clusters and managing the state of the system. Other open-source projects that use etcd include Cloud Foundry, and companies that use it in production include Alibaba, ING, Pinterest, Uber, The New York Times and Nordstrom.
“Kubernetes and many other projects like Cloud Foundry depend on etcd for reliable data storage. We’re excited to have etcd join CNCF as an incubation project and look forward to cultivating its community by improving its technical documentation, governance and more,” said Chris Aniszczyk, COO of CNCF, in today’s announcement. “Etcd is a fantastic addition to our community of projects.”
Today, etcd has well over 450 contributors and nine maintainers from eight different companies. The fact that it ended up at the CNCF is only logical, given that the foundation is also the host of Kubernetes. With this, the CNCF now plays host to 17 projects that fall under its “incubated technologies” umbrella. In addition to etcd, these include OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Vitess, NATS Helm, Rook and Harbor. Kubernetes, Prometheus and Envoy have already graduated from this incubation stage.
That’s a lot of projects for one foundation to manage, but the CNCF community is also extraordinarily large. This week alone about 8,000 developers are converging on Seattle for KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, the organization’s biggest event yet, to talk all things containers. It surely helps that the CNCF has managed to bring competitors like AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle under a single roof to collaboratively work on building these new technologies. There is a risk of losing focus here, though, something that happened to the OpenStack project when it went through a similar growth and hype phase. It’ll be interesting to see how the CNCF will manage this as it brings on more projects (with Istio, the increasingly popular service mesh, being a likely candidate for coming over to the CNCF as well).
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Solo.io raises $11M to help enterprises adopt cloud-native technologies
Solo.io, a Cambridge, Mass-based startup that helps enterprises adopt cloud-native technologies, is coming out of stealth mode today and announcing both its Series A funding round and the launch of its Gloo Enterprise API gateway.
Redpoint Ventures led the $11 million Series A round, with participation from seed investor True Ventures . Like most companies at the Series A state, Solo.io plans to use the money to invest in the product development of its enterprise and open-source tools, as well as to grow its sales and marketing teams.
Solo.io offers a number of open-source tools, like the Gloo function gateway, the Sqoop GraphQL server and the SuperGloo (see a theme here?) service mesh orchestration platform. In addition, the team has also, among others, open-sourced its Kubernetes debugger, a tool for building and running unikernels.
Its first commercial offering, though, is an enterprise version of the Gloo function gateway. Built on top of the Envoy proxy, Gloo can handle the routing necessary to connect incoming API requests to microservices, serverless applications (on the likes of AWS Lambda) and traditional monolithic applications behind the proxy. Gloo handles the load balancing and other functions necessary to aggregate the incoming API requests and route them to their destinations.
“Costumers who use Gloo to connect between microservices and serverless found that invocation of [AWS] Lambda is 350ms faster than the AWS API Gateway,” Idit Levine, the founder and CEO of Solo.io, told me. “Gloo also offers them direct money saving, since AWS bills per invocation. In general, Gloo offers money saving because it allows our clients to use the less expensive technologies — like their legacy apps, and sometimes containers — whenever they can, and limit the use of more expensive stuff to whenever it’s necessary.”
The enterprise version adds features like audit controls, single sign-on and more advanced security tools to the platform.
In addition to broadening its customer base, the company plans to invest heavily into its customer success and support teams, as well as its evangelism and education efforts, Levine tells me.
“Helping enterprises easily adopt innovative technologies like microservices, serverless and service mesh is our goal at Solo.io,” Levine in today’s announcement. “Melding different technologies into one coherent environment, by supplying a suite of tools to route, debug, manage, monitor and secure applications, lets organizations focus on their software without worrying about the complexity of the underlying environment.”
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As product development incorporates more feedback, development toolkit productboard raises $8M
Since its debut on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage in September 2016, demand for a service like productboard, which gives companies a holistic view of product development and encourages input from across an organization, has only gotten more acute, according to company chief executive Hubert Palan.
Now, with an $8 million commitment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with participation from Index Ventures, Credo Ventures, Reflex Capital and Rockaway Capital, alongside a host of angel investors, the company is looking to expand its sales and marketing and product development efforts to bring the benefits of its toolkit to more companies.
In the two years since TechCrunch last saw productboard, the company’s user base has grown significantly, from 100 customers in 2016 to more than 1,200 companies today, spanning a broad range of industries.
For Palan, the company’s growing user base (which now includes medical device companies, academic publishers and news organizations in addition to traditional digital product developers) is proof of a new demand in the market for more inputs around product design and development.
“Every company is now a digital company,” Palan said. “So every company needs to worry about digital product design.”
The company’s toolkit still includes features that allow it to hoover up information from customer support tickets, emails, input from sales teams and user research, to organize and prioritize features that need to be built.
But now, the company’s services allow anyone in an organization (with the proper access) to provide feedback and track the process of product development.
“Product Excellence is no longer optional,” said Palan in a statement. “These days competitors arise in a matter of months, not years. Customer loyalty is declining and users will happily switch to a competing solution that offers a better product experience. It’s more critical than ever to get the right products to market faster.”
As part of the financing, Kleiner Perkins’ new general partner, Ilya Fushman, will join the company’s board of directors. Fushman, who was integral in locking down productboard’s seed financing when he was at Index Ventures, has a long product history from his time at Dropbox, and is a welcome addition to the company’s board, Palan said.
While Fushman’s imprimatur is one sign of the company’s viability, the investment from strategic angel investors like Intercom co-founders Eoghan McCabe and Des Traynor; Clark Valberg, the co-founder of InVision; and Larry Gadea, the founder of Envoy, is still another.
“Product management is a core function in every technology organization, but few dedicated tools exist for it,” said Fushman, in a statement.
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Envoy Brings In $1.5 Million To Kill The Lobby Sign-In Book
When you think about things that need to be disrupted, the entryway sign-in booklet is probably the last thing on your mind. And yet. Having spent four years at Google and three years at Twitter as a backend engineer, Larry Gadea started building Envoy, an iPad-based, visitor-registration system this past November. At Twitter Gadea was part of the team that built Murder, a BitTorrent for the… Read More
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