Identity-based Cross-cluster Fabrics - Challenges & Rewards

Cloud-native infrastructures and platforms have radically improved application deployment with one major change still to come - replacing IP addresses with Identity - as defined by applications - for …

Cloud-native infrastructures and platforms have radically improved application deployment with one major change still to come - replacing IP addresses with Identity - as defined by applications - for cross-cluster service-to-service communication.Challenges include deriving application intent and identity directly from the application manifest, enabling cross-domain networking based only on identity, making flows directly programmable as code, and achieving authorization and authentication of identity as well as flow telemetry and code updates that are virtually instant. Rewards include making NetOps a reality, ie bringing network policy as code into CI/CD pipelines, creating networks that dynamically respond to applications and conditions, giving applications full observability to flow-level telemetry. Also, this enables compute-in-network functions for advanced AI and IOT applications.