Citrix is excited to announce five new ways we’re helping customers on their journey to microservices:

  • Google Anthos integration extended to on-prem
  • A holistic observability stack to tame the observability challenge
  • mTLS support for securing Istio service mesh environments
  • Improved ingress security for APIs
  • A simpler way to manage TCP/UDP-based applications in Kubernetes

Google Anthos Integration Extended to On-Prem

Google Anthos is a Kubernetes-based platform that helps you build microservices apps and run them anywhere. As a Google technology partner, Citrix is excited to announce the validation of Citrix ADCs for Google Anthos on-prem. This means that you can integrate your existing on-prem Citrix ADCs like MPX, VPX, and CPX into Google Anthos with confidence. And, because Citrix VPX and CPX were previously validated for the Google Anthos cloud environment, you can maintain operational and policy consistency for your Citrix ADC between your on-prem and cloud environments, easing app migration.

You can also use Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) service graphs to visualize your microservice maps, gain insights about microservice health, and detect anomalies and potential problems. Additionally, pooled capacity licensing enables you to seamlessly shift Citrix ADC licenses when you migrate your applications between on-prem and cloud.

A Holistic Observability Stack to Tame the Observability Challenge

Citrix’s vision is observability as a stack for microservices, not as individual, disjointed components. We’re introducing a holistic observability stack for microservices with four pillars: logging, metrics, tracing, and service graphs. Citrix ADC integrates with leading open-source tools for logging (Elasticsearch, Kibana), metrics (Prometheus, Grafana), and tracing (OpenTracing with Zipkin). We can extend the capabilities of these open-source tools by delivering more telemetry for TCP, HTTP, security, and SSL.

Citrix ADM service graphs are dynamic graphical representations of microservices and their interdependencies. Customers can visualize their microservices maps at a glance and identify issues with microservices with simple color coding and composite health scores. A DVR-like function allows SREs to rewind the timeline to a specific time period. This dramatically reduces the time to diagnose and remediate issues and conduct postmortems.

As a complement to the basic pillars of observability (logging, metrics and tracing), service graphs enhance the observability stack and provide an easy-to-use and convenient way to gain insight and troubleshoot microservices environments faster.

mTLS Support for Securing Istio Service Mesh Environments

As we see more cloud-native deployments, customers are exploring service mesh architectures and considering Istio as an open-source control plane. Citrix ADC, as a tried and tested proxy, is a perfect data plane complement to Istio. To secure the communication between microservices, Citrix ADC now supports mutual TLS (mTLS) authentication using Itsio control plane.

Citrix ADC acts as a high-performance gateway device (MPX, VPX) and also as a lightweight, low-latency, sidecar proxy (CPX as sidecar) to deliver the functionality required to enforce security policies you define with Istio.

Enhanced Ingress Security for APIs

APIs are the cornerstone of your microservices. But they’re also vulnerable assets that need to be protected. Now, Citrix ADC as an ingress proxy supports IP address whitelisting and blacklisting, rate limiting, and content routing to ensure that only trusted traffic is allowed into the Kubernetes cluster. This functionality is enabled via custom resource definitions (CRDs) for easier integration with your Kubernetes environment.

Citrix is also introducing SSL Profiles for microservices environments on Citrix ADC. By defining acceptable SSL settings (e.g. ciphers, protocol, key strength) and binding them to your different entities, your developers can ensure consistent encryption policies that meet the appropriate security requirements.

Simpler Ingress Management for TCP/UDP apps with Citrix Ingress Controller

While Kubernetes Ingress provides a standard way to control and route HTTP(s) traffic into the cluster, operators are left to use inconsistent mechanisms for non-HTTP traffic such as type LoadBalancer (only supported in the Cloud) or NodePort (not optimal for production).

Citrix Ingress Controller now offers support for type LoadBalancer with a built-in IP address manager that is consistent across clouds and on-premises deployments. The support for standard Kubernetes concepts and the deep L4-L7 telemetry afforded by Citrix ADC provides a solid foundation for high-velocity team to operate across traditional apps, modernized microservices apps, and across hybrid-cloud implementations.

The Citrix vision is to accelerate your journey to microservices-based applications with confidence, agility, and security. Visit our booth (#G8) at KubeCon 2019 this week to learn more.