Aspen Mesh Beta Now Available for Microservice Infrastructures

Innovation from F5 provides enterprise-ready service mesh solution with Istio

SEATTLE, DECEMBER 10, 2018 – Today at KubeCon North America, Aspen Mesh, an innovation from F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV), announced an open public beta of its fully supported service mesh built on Istio.

As companies move to a model where applications are continuously developed and deployed, they are leveraging microservices to effectively build and manage them. However, this often adds complexity and de-centralizes ownership and control, so companies are increasingly employing service mesh technology to ensure resiliency and uptime.

Many companies are adopting Istio as their service mesh of choice as it provides a toolbox of different features with a broad range of microservices capabilities. But some critical enterprise challenges remain, especially around monitoring, managing, and controlling microservice-based applications at runtime. In particular, enterprises need feature sets that address observability, policy, and security.

“Observing, controlling, and securing microservice-based applications can be a major challenge,” commented William Fellows, Research Vice President at 451 Research. “A service mesh provides a myriad of capabilities that make it easier to manage these containerized applications at runtime. Aspen Mesh simplifies service mesh implementation through engineering support and a fully tested and documented version of Istio that makes it easier to get all the benefits of a service mesh.”

“DevOps represents two teams, Development and Operations, coming together to deliver better products more rapidly. Service mesh is a glue that helps unite these teams and provides one place in the stack that you can manage microservices at runtime without changes to the application or cluster,” said Shawn Wormke, Incubation Lead at Aspen Mesh. “The result is a platform that empowers application developers to focus on their code and allows operators to more easily provide developers with a resilient, scalable, and secure environment.”

With this in mind, Aspen Mesh provides critical enterprise features in a platform built on top of Istio, so organizations enjoy the benefits of an open source approach without forgoing the features, support, and guarantees needed to power enterprise applications.

Specifically, Aspen Mesh builds on the Istio feature set by providing:

• Advanced policy and configuration options
• Analytics and alerting
• Multi-cluster/multi-cloud capabilities
• An intuitive UI
• A fully hosted SaaS platform
• Complete support from our team of service mesh experts

You can find out more by visiting the Aspen Mesh blog. And you can take advantage of these features for free and participate in the beta by signing up for Aspen Mesh access. If you’re attending KubeCon, swing by the Aspen Mesh booth S29 to talk to the team and see Aspen Mesh in action.

Aspen Mesh is one of the first projects to come out of F5 Networks' recently launched corporate incubation program aimed at developing enhanced solutions to better support modern application services, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. It also represents another step F5 is taking toward delivering an easily consumed portfolio of application services. In addition, F5 produced the recently announced preview of F5 Cloud Services on AWS. F5 will be bringing to market additional software and SaaS application services for developers in the first half of calendar year 2019.

About Aspen Mesh

Aspen Mesh, an innovation from F5 Networks, is the enterprise-ready service mesh built on Istio. Aspen Mesh makes service mesh easy with complete support and a fully hosted SaaS platform. Gain control and confidence over how you manage containerized applications at runtime. For more information, go to aspenmesh.io. You can also visit us on Twitter or LinkedIn to stay up to speed on the latest developments. 

About F5

F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV) gives the world’s largest businesses, service providers, governments, and consumer brands the freedom to securely deliver every app, anywhere—with confidence. F5 delivers cloud and security application services that enable organizations to embrace the infrastructure they choose without sacrificing speed and control. For more information, go to f5.com. You can also follow @f5networks on Twitter or visit us on LinkedIn and Facebook for more information about F5, its partners, and technologies.

F5 and Aspen Mesh are trademarks or service marks of F5 Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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