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AMPLIFY Central Mesh Governance is Here…But, What’s a Service Mesh?

AMPLIFY Central Mesh Governance is available in beta. All new organizations that join the AMPLIFY platform are automatically enrolled in the public beta program for it when they subscribe to Application Integration… but, What’s a service mesh? 

This blog will answer that question and more. 

Q: First, why AMPLIFY Central? What happened to API Central?
A:  API Central “grew up” and became a unifying and common part of AMPLIFYso it is no AMPLIFY Central. 

Q: What is Mesh Governance?
A: AMPLIFY Central with Mesh Governance can now do more than API Central could in the past, and part of that is the ability to both manage APIs (as API Central always did) but also help customers manage their private cloud environments via a hybrid deployed service mesh. 

READ MORE: Discover what’s new in AMPLIFY.

Q: Why is the Mesh Governance option still in Beta, but the rest of AMPLIFY Central is GA?
A: AMPLIFY Central (and the rest of the AMPLIFY platform) is a SaaS solution, meaning we update and evolve it frequently. The Mesh Governance feature is not fully complete yet, but we want all customers to try it out and give us feedback. 

Q: Can AMPLIFY Central still help me secure and manage my APIs too?
A: Yes, it still does that, but it can now also discover and manage microservices that live on the hybrid connected private clouds that can be attached to each AMPLIFY customer’s tenant view of their organization. 

Q: What kind of service mesh feature is this?
A: We are providing a “bring your own Kubernetes” cluster approach that allows us to add a service mesh layer on top of a Kubernetes cluster. While we are trying to be a light touch to the cluster, we are still adding a mesh (we use Istio/Envoy) to the private cloud as part of our deployment. 

Q: What value does our service mesh add?
A: Take a look at what our “mesh agents” do and see that we are exposing existing customer microservices back into their AMPLIFY Central view of their organizational APIs. Now, they can manage APIs and Services from the same “cockpit” in AMPLIFY. This is part of AMPLIFY Central becoming a common control plane for customers to use to manage internal and external services, and then to manage their sharing of those APIs and services to their own consumers via the AMPLIFY Central Unified Catalog. 

Q: Lots of vendors resell or use Istio. What’s so special about what Axway is doing with it?
A: We are using Istio as a standard service mesh (along with our Axway mesh agents) to provide a combined view of all internal and external APIs to the customer, then allowing them to decide which ones to expose to their customers, developers and consumers. 

Q: So, what if I have more than one private cloud that I want to connect up and manage?
A: You can do that. Each service mesh is connected to your AMPLIFY Central organizational view as a separate environment to manage. You can have both an individual environment view and a combined global view of the services, policies and externally exposed (we call them “proxied”) APIs for each environment. 

Q: Does this new Mesh Governance feature replace Kubernetes or Open Shift?
A: No, we are adding service management on top of the container management they already provide for the customer in their OnPrem or private cloud environments. 

Q: How is this service mesh attached to AMPLIFY? How is it attached to AMPLIFY Central?
A: Take a look at the Axway Mesh Agents overview to understand more about this… Axway Mesh Agents 

Q: Where does the mesh run? Where are my services located if they are not being hosted in AMPLIFY Central?
A: That’s the beauty of our AMPLIFY hybrid model. The private cloud can be wherever the customer wants it to be… as long as they have a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster. We use the hybrid ability of AMPLIFY Central to connect our control plane to that customer private cloud to expose their services and manage policy assignments against them. 

Q: What if I already have a service mesh—can I connect that up to AMPLIFY?
A: Yes and no. If you have a public version of Istio, you should be able to follow our steps described here and skip the Istio deployment step but still add our mesh agents to your cluster to connect it back to your AMPLIFY Central account. 

Q: How do I get a service mesh set up? What if I need more help building or accessing a hybrid environment to use?
A: Follow our instructions to build your own and connect it up; they are here: AMPLIFY Central Mesh Governance feature And, learn more about how Mesh Governance is a key part of AMPLIFY here: Learn about AMPLIFY and HIP. 

Q: What about OpenShift or Microsoft Azure support? What about… ?
A: The reason we are in Public Beta is to gather some additional feedback from our customer base about what Kubernetes container layer(s) they would like us to support and to validate our approach to policy assignment and management. 

READ MORE: AMPLIFY Central solves “The need for speed” with enterprise APIs and services.

Don’t wait. Sign up for AMPLIFY today.

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