Sponsored Keynote: Universal Mesh: Connect and Secure Everything - Baptiste Assmann

This talk introduces the concept of Universal Mesh, a solution designed to simplify the management and interconnectivity of diverse IT infrastructures. The speaker discusses the challenges organizations face as they grow and evolve, emphasizing the need for high availability and compliance in the rapidly changing tech landscape. He explains that while traditional networking solutions and service meshes have their benefits, they often lack the flexibility to integrate heterogeneous systems effectively. The Universal Mesh aims to bridge these gaps by enabling seamless communication across various applications and platforms, utilizing technologies like mTLS and ACLs for security and observability. Ultimately, this approach supports both legacy and future workloads, allowing organizations to scale efficiently and maintain operational continuity.

Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining here. So, yeah, we are going to speak about Universal Mesh. We all wish our infrastructure would be very simple and straightforward to manage and to operate. The point is that the IT infrastructure IT system is usually the backbone of your company and of your business. And because your business has to evolve, the IT system has to evolve as well.

>> [clears throat] >> By this, we mean that the company will grow, your business will grow, so the IT system has to grow as well. You have to innovate to be more relevant in your market or even get new market share from other systems where you want to move to. Sometimes also some companies will evolve by acquiring other companies, and so you have to merge IT systems

together. And last but not least, in the market where we are, I mean the IT IT market, it's evolving very fast. And every year, every few years, we have new technology that we want to maybe integrate into our existing system. All this create a a mandate what the wish is very far away from the reality. The reality is that we must provide high availability system because of

course business continuity is important. You don't want your IT system to crash, and if it crashes, you want your company to continue being able to operate. also sometimes, you know, when you try to get new markets or when you try to get new customer, then you will have compliance system that will come and you will say, "Oh, you must enable web application firewall. You must to secure

everything." And then of course it introduces even more challenges. problem you guys are going to face is how I'm supposed to interconnect all these together in a simple manner. Basically, um system will become something that we call kind of fractured. Because you are going to have heterogeneous application infrastructure that will have to merge together in one way or another. Because when you when you spawn a new

application, it may have to use web service exposed by an old application. So, how do we do this? First, we have networking solutions available for many many years. The routers, web application firewall, VPNs can be used to interconnect things. The problem is that they [snorts] are usually not very flexible, and they have no information on what's happening at the application level. Another solution that came recently-ish, I

would say, in the IT system is something we call the service mesh. You have heard of this, I guess. The purpose of the service mesh is to definitely secure and make your application traffic more observable. It works, but it works only in a limited scope of the fractured IT that we just described before. Basically, it works only in Kubernetes. Mainly, sometimes you can interconnect couple of communities

clusters, but if you need to interconnect, you know, PHP application running on the VM, etc., then you need something different. So, service mesh was a good start, but we need as an industry to come with something more universal. That's why we call this architecture pattern the universal mesh. Purpose is to be able to connect everything and anything together. This vision only works because of federation. So, if

you are not able to federate your various systems running on multiple clouds, multiple data centers, then it will be complicated for you. We want to reuse existing components. We want to keep security. We want to keep observability because that's the most important feature that you expect from such type of solution. That's why we want to introduce you guys to the universal mesh. So, purpose is to interconnect

all your existing proxies into your data centers, have a solution for this. And when you use technology which is approved like mTLS, ACLs, maps of things you allow to speak together, then you can make it happen on any cloud provider, on any data center. Purpose of this pattern is to support your current workload, your legacy workload, and also the upcoming workload. I don't know if you have

heard AI factory project. So, if you don't have one yet, you will have one for sure at some point in time very soon. And by using technology which are approved, I mean, then it's easy and and sorry, and protocols which are well used and well distributed by everyone, then it's easy to scale and to continue sustaining the growth of your company.