Tetrate announces that its tools will now run natively on Arm chips
We’re excited to bring Transform 2022 back in person on July 19 and pretty much July 20-28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful conversations and exciting networking opportunities. Register today!
Arm chip architecture received another boost from support from Tetrate. The company, which builds service mesh support software, has announced that their products will now support Arm’s Neoverse platform. Both of Tetrate’s core tools, Envoy and Istio, now run natively on the Arm chips that are quickly becoming known for offering cheaper computers in cloud environments.
In addition, Tetrate is rolling out a hardened version of its code to support defense customers. Some federal customers want a version of Tetrate’s Istio to support Kubernetes and other services in various military clouds such as the Platform One program and Iron Bank.
Tetrate’s tools simplify connecting large networks of smaller applications working together. The idea of breaking down a software application into smaller, more manageable pieces known as microservices has become the dominant architecture.
Rising Demand for Microservices in the Enterprise
It is now common for business packages to consist of tens, hundreds, or maybe even thousands of smaller microservices. These microservices need to coordinate and that’s where Tetrate comes in. Their software takes care of the communication and organization of the individual services in what it calls a ‘mesh’.
Tetrate’s software encrypts messages as they travel between microservice providers, protecting all personal information along the way. The software also verifies the different nodes in the mesh, simplifying security concerns.
The Arm chips are gaining popularity in cloud computing because they offer better performance at a lower price. For example, Nvidia makes Arm-based chips with Arm cores and calls them “DPUs” or data processing units.
Several companies like Apple use the architecture because it can provide faster performance while using less power. Cloud providers like Amazon have different needs than phone manufacturers, but saving electricity is a big focus for them.
Arm chip gets a grip
In their announcement, Tetrate focused on the new Gravitron processors launched by AWS and emphasized their faster benchmark scores. The new Graviton3 is said to offer 25% better performance than the previous Gravitron2, but some runways can see even more. For example, some machine learning training algorithms rely heavily on single-precision floating point computations, and AWS estimates that the Graviton3 can double the speed for these specific tasks.
“We’re like another workload running on these chips, so the reduction [in cost and run time] will be comparable to all the other workloads they see,” explains Varun Talwar, co-founder of Tetrate. “It varies from 10% to 35% depending on the situation,” he claims.
While Tetrate worked with both Arm and AWS in this particular project, the Arm chip is finding traction in other implementations. Talwar says Tetrate was motivated by seeing the Arm chips appear in some hardware running in edge machines close to users.
“Those projects tend to use lighter Kubernetes, and they’re very sensitive to compute time, cost, and latency.” said Talwar.
Federal customers share all of these needs with heightened security concerns. The new hardened versions of Tetrate tools will also support Arm architectures.
“For us, it’s a pretty significant achievement to have a secure build where they actually use it for authentication, authorization and encryption for every service to service communication and to run that at scale,” explains Talwar.
VentureBeat’s mission is to be a digital city square for tech decision makers to learn about transformative business technology and transactions. Learn more about membership.
This post Tetrate announces that its tools will now run natively on Arm chips
was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/04/15/tetrate-announces-its-tools-will-now-run-natively-on-arm-chips/”
