Figure 1. Gluware Intelligent Network Automation at-a-Glance

Comprising Gluware Intelligent Orchestration Engine and Gluware Control, Gluware’s Intelligent Network Automation platform hosts a suite of intent-based applications, including Config Drift and Audit, Config Modeling, Dashboard, Data Explorer, Network RPA, OS Manager, and Device Manager. These integrated components provision inventory, drift, audit, and config management tasks via SSH (or REST) to enterprise network devices.

Communicating with multi-vendor, multi-platform physical and virtual systems via an API or CLI, Gluware Intelligent Orchestration Engine provides data-model driven, intent-based intelligence to discover, analyze, and validate network actions at scale. This feature can be used to accelerate the replacement of less extensible and less secure legacy network configuration and change management (NCCM) solutions.

Actions are automated via Gluware Intent-Based Applications, which incorporate modular, purpose-built functions for device management and inventory, configuration drift and audit, OS upgrades, configuration modeling, and workflow automation. For example, the Gluware Config Drift application takes periodic high-resolution “snapshots” of either the entire network or specific nodes to establish a baseline configuration. Automated line-by-line comparisons detect changes, triggering device remediation or promoting the snapshot to the current default.

Gluware Control, the cloud-based or on-premises control panel for Gluware’s platform, allows you to administer users with role-based access, create organizations for multi-tenant network management, import devices, perform inventory, and load and manage software packages and applications. The Data Explorer application also offers increased network visibility and allows any data to be extracted from within the Gluware databases to create actionable insights. The new Network RPA application provides the ability to build end-to-end process automation with a no-code drag-and-drop interface. It enables a CI/CD approach with the integrated ability to build, test, deploy, and monitor automated processes. Gluware provides native tasks to orchestrate its underlying app suite and also integrates with StackStorm to provide more than 150 external integrations for platforms including Ansible, AWS, Jira, ServiceNow, and Slack.

In addition to providing off-the-shelf applications, Gluware Lab accelerates deployment by eliminating the need to build your own automation. A self-contained CI/CD ecosystem deployed on-premises, Gluware Lab enables customers to develop their own features, networking packages, custom API integrations, and workflows on top of the Gluware platform for on-premises or cloud-based deployments.

Gluware Enterprise, hosted on premises or in the cloud, offers flexibility and scalability to address the needs of larger enterprises or those requiring special sizing. It can scale to any size network, and customers can select which components of the Gluware Application Suite they want to deploy. Incorporating Gluware Zone Engine Servers, Gluware Enterprise enables provisioning power to be distributed to geographical regions or edge locations, or data centers with a cluster of network devices.

With Gluware’s SaaS offering, Gluware Pro, customers download and install the Gluware Secure Gateway (GSG) virtual appliance on their network, providing a secure TLS tunnel to the AWS-hosted, multi-tenant Gluware instance. Designed for networks of up to 2,000 devices, a single GSG provides dual provisioning engines with Gluware Pro supporting the deployment of two GSGs on each customer network for redundancy.

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Cloud networking providers use the native networking capabilities from each provider, orchestrating their configurations from a central management solution. Additionally, cloud networking vendors can provide specialized functions such as firewalls or routers with more features compared to counterparts offered by the cloud providers. With these capabilities, cloud networking vendors have to address everyday networking: specific challenges such as network design, deployment, management, and security, but with a cloud twist. Network segmentation now needs to span multiple and distributed environments, monitoring and observability will have greater and more complex networks to understand, optimization should span cloud-to-cloud intelligence, and even routing brings in new networking functions such as transit gateways.

The best way of addressing all these challenges is to abstract all networking constructs and present them in a single orchestration solution that can handle multiple types of infrastructure and provision networking instances with minimal configuration. This consolidated orchestration changes the cloud networking experience from an overwhelming problem to a much more casual activity. Connecting another public cloud environment should feel like ‘just another instance to connect’ rather than a whole architecture overhaul.

At this higher level of abstraction, application-to-application connectivity is one of the most important use cases that cloud networking solutions need to address. Rather than having a networks team to handle networking constructs at layer 3 and 4, which can then be used by the application team, a cloud networking solution can provision layer 3 and 4 instances automatically, allowing the DevOps teams to work exclusively at layer 7 and focus on content-aware application-to-application connectivity.

With this type of capability at the application teams’ fingertips, applications no longer have to be bound to a single region or provider, expanding use cases to multicloud, hybrid cloud, and edge locations. Cloud networking reduces the amount of vendor-specific knowledge required to interconnect environments by offering a unified and consistent management interface. Rather than adopting an unsophisticated ‘connecting multiple environments’ approach, we can reframe cloud networking as one of the core enablers of developing and maintaining cutting-edge applications using all the available types of infrastructure.

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The virtualized nature of cloud environments, by which infrastructure is delivered as a service, does not allow cloud tenants the possibility of deploying hardware appliances like they do at on-premises data centers. Therefore, to enable networking in the cloud, providers have offered the virtual equivalent of appliances such as routers, firewalls, and load balancers. Within a cloud environment’s availability zones, these native tools allow users to logically define their virtual infrastructure estate and create policies that enable applications to communicate with each other without traversing the public internet.

While these cloud-native tools work fairly well within one provider’s environment, communicating across multiple availability zones, public clouds, private clouds, colocation, on-premises devices, and edge locations is difficult and hard to secure. Cloud networking providers enhance the capabilities of these native tools with better visibility, multi-cloud awareness, service insertion, granular controls, security, and third-party integrations. The cloud networking software we will be evaluating can be deployed in any one environment and can also enable communication among multiple environments.

Whether native or not, cloud networking software is, in essence, the software version of a traditionally physical appliance. It is a collection of VNFs. However, it must offer additional features as well, beyond network function virtualization (NFV), that make it suitable for cloud workloads. Such features include:

• Cloud awareness: The solution has visibility and control over the cloud providers’ data centers, regions, or availability zones.
• DevOps suitable: To enhance DevOps practices, cloud networking needs to leverage infrastructure-as-code tools, which can help to include networking as part of the CI/CD methodology.
• Application performance: The solution is designed to ensure application performance (and quality of experience) by operating at L7.
• Autoscaling: The solution can allocate and retract networking resources dynamically based on demand.

Additionally, modern solutions provide a centralized management platform that offers control over all of the customer’s cloud environments and on-premises data centers. The solution can either be interacted with via a graphical user interface (GUI), command-line interface (CLI), or application programming interface (API), or it can be integrated with infrastructure as code tools. The management solution can help as well with topological views, troubleshooting, performance monitoring, access controls, and compliance.

Security for cloud networking involves two facets: traffic filtering and secure access. For traffic filtering, we can employ VNFs such as firewalls, either as standalone devices or as part of transit gateways, to create segments and microsegments that isolate applications or databases. For secure access, we use access control lists, zero-trust network access, and multifactor authentication.

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Moreover, the vast amount of analytical data generated and the ongoing deployment of ultrafast 5G mobile technologies pave the way for network-based services to shift from running on centralized public cloud services to the edge for fast, cost-effective, secure data processing. Meeting the challenge, mobile edge platforms allow compute and storage resources to be provisioned as close to the end user as possible—either at the boundary or within the operator network. In addition, mobile edge platforms allow operators to open up their radio access network (RAN) edge to authorized third parties, enabling them to rapidly deploy innovative applications and services for use by individual and enterprise consumers.

Mobile edge platforms deliver faster response times, increased insight, and an enhanced user experience. Additionally, these platforms can improve business agility and create new customer experiences in several ways, including:

• Improved operational efficiency, cost optimization, and risk mitigation by reducing the volume of data backhauled to centralized processing hubs;
• Ultra-low latency and accelerated time-to-insights by tapping into and processing data at the edge of the 4G LTE or 5G network;
• Increased availability with autonomous edge systems enabling continuous operations even when disconnected, reducing disruption and lowering costs; and
• Addressing many of the challenges associated with distributed computing, including bandwidth, data sovereignty, latency, and resiliency.

This decentralized approach—processing data as close to its origin as possible—is already operational in many industries to support emerging use cases. These include autonomous vehicles, drone-enabled precision agriculture and crop management, offshore oil and gas monitoring, real-time video surveillance, and utility smart-grid analysis.

Despite being a relatively new technology, more and more organizations are adopting mobile edge platforms to enable new use cases. This GigaOm Key Criteria report outlines critical criteria and evaluation metrics for selecting a mobile edge platform. The corresponding GigaOm Radar Report provides an overview of noteworthy mobile edge vendors and their offerings available today. Together, these reports are designed to help educate decision-makers, providing critical insights for enabling edge processing initiatives.

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This ability to operate without a license lowers a significant entry barrier and enables startups to disrupt the wider IoT technology space with innovative approaches. Within the unlicensed LPWAN network providers space, we’ve identified four types of IoT connectivity providers:

1. Network operators: This model resembles the one used by mobile network operators (3G/4G/5G), in which the operator deploys and manages the core infrastructure and the radio access networks (RANs). The operator is solely responsible for deploying new gateways to provide coverage in other areas. Typically, network operators offer IoT connectivity in a network-as-a-service model, for which the customer only needs to subscribe their devices to the network. In this report, we classify as network operators the following vendors: Everynet, Netmore, Sigfox, and Senet.
2. Satellite-based connectivity: An increasing number of vendors are entering the market offering ubiquitous connectivity via satellites. Devices can communicate with satellites either directly or indirectly through lightweight and portable gateways. To connect to a satellite network, network providers can use protocols such as LoRa on Very High Frequency (VHF) to either connect directly to devices, or to transceiver gateways. The only satellite-based vendor featured in this report is Swarm Technologies. However, other vendors such as Lacuna Space and Echostar Mobile will launch commercial offerings in the near future.
3. Open, community-based network: A central provider operates the core infrastructure, namely the network servers, while the gateways (which provide the coverage) are run by third parties, which can be either enterprises or consumers. The advantages of building IoT solutions on community-based networks are low costs (even free) and high flexibility. The Things Network is the only community-based network featured in this report.
4. Decentralized, blockchain-based network: Central providers deploy and maintain the core infrastructure, while gateways are operated by independent third parties. Gateway operators are incentivized to run gateways by using them to mine cryptocurrencies and are rewarded based on the gateway’s health and proof of connectivity. Operating on a blockchain network creates tamper-resistant records of shared transactions, which allows enterprises to share and access IoT data without a central authority. We feature the following vendors in this category: Helium, MXC Foundation, and Nesten.

Throughout these four categories of LPWAN network providers, enterprises have many options available for their use cases. Each type of provider has advantages and disadvantages. For example, network operators follow a tried-and-tested model that can offer better carrier-grade SLAs. Satellite providers can provide connectivity in areas where other communications are not available, and decentralized networks have the highest scalability potential and can have lower subscription costs.

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Grey Matter At-a-Glance

The platform comprises an internally developed control plane for service-based architectures, and either an Envoy or Hashicorp Consul-based sidecar data plane with extended filters for east-west internal traffic routing. An API gateway controls north-south traffic flows. In addition, Grey Matter integrates with Open Policy Agent (OPA) for zero-trust, policy-based access control at every point on the mesh, and is flexible and open enough to interoperate with other service meshes.

Delivering a comprehensive audit-compliance engine and SPIFFE/SPIRE identity authorization out of the box, Grey Matter provides service audit compliance reporting without special instrumentation. (Note: SPIRE is a production-ready implementation of SPIFFE—the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone.) Real-time audit taps at Layers 3, 4, and 7 provide a single source of truth for every user and action on the mesh throughout the lifespan of each object.

Designed to treat proxy-based service mesh telemetry as a source of business intelligence, Grey Matter leverages AI and machine learning to analyze data, including Layers 3, 4, and 7 network insights, for automated performance optimization and resource control. Powered by recurrent neural autoencoders, Grey Matter’s anomaly detection capabilities capture minute operational inconsistencies, predict potential issues, and alert users to inconsistencies against normal operational patterns via an intuitive contextual UI to take remedial action.

Grey Matter is designed to be platform-agnostic and polyglot. The platform wraps existing IT investments in a ubiquitous Layer 3, 4, and 7 network, securely connecting existing operations support system and business support system (OSS/BSS) layers to cloud-native technologies. Capable of operating in any public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud or container orchestration platform, Grey Matter comes with built-in support for K8s, AWS EKS, Azure AKS, OpenShift OCP, OKD, Konvoy, and bare metal. It is also container-agnostic, supporting Docker, CoreOS, OpenShift, Rancher, and other containers.

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NetDevOps is the application of DevOps principles and techniques to network operations (NetOps), minimizing operator interactions and optimizing programmable network processes to configure, deploy, and manage the environment. Prioritizing alignment with business objectives over network control, NetDevOps—also known as DevNetOps, network automation, or intent-based networking (IBN)—relies on automation and intelligent infrastructure management to increase efficiency and ensure network availability, quality, and reliability.

NetDevOps encompasses the abstraction, codification, and implementation of network Infrastructure as Code (IaC), using programmed, automated workflows to eliminate configuration drift, thereby embedding quality and resiliency within the network. A continuous integration, delivery, and deployment pipeline ships code through the different development environments into production, triggering comprehensive validation and compliance tests along the way. NetDevOps also includes continuous monitoring, measurement, and response, automatically triggering remediation alerts or tasks when detecting configuration drift from the desired state.

NetDevOps alleviates challenges and increases agility by applying DevOps behaviors, culture, and principles to network operations. It minimizes manual administrative tasks (such as configuration changes, service provisioning, and security tasks), reducing human error as one of the root causes of network downtime.

And by automating the planning, configuration, testing, and deployment of network infrastructure, the NetDevOps pipeline reduces the lead time between development and implementation. In addition, it enables small incremental changes to be injected into the network with minimal effort and zero end-user impact, resulting in increased agility, quality, and speed of operations.

This report provides an overview of the vendor landscape based on the following table stakes, which are mature, stable solution features common across all vendors:

• Automated workflows: Automated workflows provide complete lifecycle management functionality to configure, deploy, and upgrade network elements seamlessly. A collection of carefully orchestrated building blocks, automated workflows split higher-level activities into subtasks linked to network events, triggering either proactive or reactive actions encompassing inventory checks, pre-checks, post-checks, show-commands, user forms and approvals, scheduled background tasks, and other tasks.

• State awareness: The state of the network is monitored in real-time with full protocol and transport neutrality. Awareness of automated network infrastructure deployments and implementations is required to ensure the desired network state is achieved and maintained. State awareness enables the continuous synchronization of the network state and configuration in real-time using open, state-streaming APIs. It also provides advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning analytics capabilities for visibility, troubleshooting, and compliance.

• Infrastructure as code (IaC): Network configurations are abstracted as code for replication, reuse, repurpose, or testing, providing optimal resource usage. Used in conjunction with continuous delivery, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) manages infrastructure (connection topologies, load balancers, networks, and virtual machines) in a descriptive model to reduce environment drift by eliminating inconsistencies leading to deployment issues requiring manual resolution. Furthermore, based on the principle of idempotence, IaC ensures you always end up with the same end state, irrespective of the starting state.

• On-demand elasticity: On-demand elasticity is the ability to spin up and down test, development, and sandbox infrastructure environments on demand without jeopardizing compliance, governance, performance, security, or stability. Unlike scalability, for which resources are added to accommodate larger loads, elasticity allows network resources to be dynamically added or removed based on changing application traffic patterns such as seasonal or peak traffic surges.

• Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD): Commonly associated with DevOps, CI/CD supports agile networking with continuous integration, delivery, and deployment. Closely integrated with on-demand elasticity, CI/CD for networks represents the ability to spin up network infrastructure services using tools familiar to application developers—such as Bitbucket, Docker, GitLab, GitHub, and Jenkins—on an as-needed basis.

• Self-service access: Robust, role-based self-service access to network infrastructures—such as DHCP, DNS, firewalls, load balancers, and other network services—allows development teams to consume networking services easily and quickly. Eliminating network team provisioning and configuration bottlenecks, self-service access allows application delivery teams to initiate the automated deployment and configuration of network services while ensuring compliance.

The list of vendors included in this report is by no means exhaustive. As a new sector meeting the demand for agile networking, we anticipate rapid evolution in the next 18-36 months. New players will emerge with lean, innovative solutions, while established networking vendors will compete by acquiring solution vendors and expanding critical partnerships. With many different NetDevOps vendors and options available—and the landscape evolving—choosing the best NetDevOps solution for your organization depends on your use cases, existing software stack, architectural choices, and in-house capabilities.

We recommend using this report to explore the different NetDevOps solutions and delivery models available on the market, identifying solutions and vendors matching your business requirements, use cases, and capabilities. Then contact the relevant vendors for additional information on features, deployment models, and cost.

For additional information about choosing a NetDevOps solution, please read the report, “Key Criteria for Evaluating NetDevOps,” published by GigaOm.

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Organizations with more than one location have always needed some form of wide-area network (WAN). And now enterprises of all sizes and shapes are becoming more and more distributed. At the same time, various forms of cloud services have become more widely adopted. This public cloud adoption often makes traditional solutions for corporate WANs, like managed, private multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks, sub-optimal or even obsolete. More recently, the Covid pandemic and associated social distancing have accelerated the adoption of different network access technologies, including SD-WAN, in smaller home office and home education scenarios.

In addition to these fundamental shifts in the demands on WANs, the modern enterprise is more acutely aware of the need for security. It is more dependent than ever on pervasive connectivity and good network performance. This combination of trends has left IT managers scrambling for a secure method of reliably connecting their users, their data, and their applications. SD-WAN emerged to fill this growing need.

SD-WAN brings key tenets of software-defined networking (SDN) into the enterprise WAN, notably:

• Centralized control can be more efficient than distributed routing in certain scenarios.
• Centralized management can make it much easier to operate a large network than traditional box-by-box management.

We can say that SD-WAN is a concept, not a technology, because there is no single underlying protocol that defines an SD-WAN. Rather, it is an operating model enabled by various vendors’ products in different ways.

While the SD-WAN market is not yet fully mature, many enterprises have chosen to test or deploy SD-WAN solutions already. The primary drivers include hoped-for improvements in network performance, reliability, monitoring capabilities, and security, as well as cost reduction benefits.

When planning for SD-WAN deployment, multiple factors need to be considered, many of which are directly related to the specific SD-WAN product you choose. Others, such as which types of circuits to use for the physical connectivity and whether a do-it-yourself (DIY) or a managed approach to deployment and operation is more appropriate, are typically independent of the SD-WAN technology provider you select.

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Gloo Mesh can be run either in its own cluster or co-located with Kubernetes pods, enabling global traffic routing, load balancing, access control, and centralized observability of multi-cluster environments. It discovers Kubernetes-based microservices and workloads and establishes a federated identity, aiding the configuration of different service meshes through a single API. Gloo Mesh supports multi-platform service meshes spanning clouds and zones, locality-aware routing, and cross-cluster failover for zero trust networks.

Solo.io also provides Gloo Edge, a decoupled control plane for the Envoy Proxy. It allows customers to iteratively add API gateway capabilities to their cluster ingress without investing in a full-blown service mesh. Moreover, it integrates with Flagger—a delivery tool that automates the release process for Kubernetes workloads using GitOps pipelines—for canary automation.

Solo.io also created WebAssembly Hub, a streamlined service for building, sharing, discovering, and deploying WebAssembly (WASM) extensions for managing traffic and delivering near-native performance of Envoy Proxy-based service meshes.

In August 2021, the company announced Gloo Mesh Gateway, a full-featured API gateway and ingress controller based on Istio, for north-south application traffic at the edge.

In October 2021, the company announced GraphQL integration with Gloo Mesh, enabling developers to query their APIs directly through their service mesh.

Gloo Mesh At-a-Glance

According to Solo.io, Gloo Mesh is a critical component of the Gloo API Infrastructure Platform, providing a modern approach to API management and accelerating innovation across distributed cloud workloads and environments. Additionally, Gloo Mesh Enterprise includes the Istio-based Gloo Mesh Gateway and/or integrates with the Envoy Proxy-based Gloo Edge API Gateway for end-to-end encryption, security, and traffic control. This incorporates traffic management into both east-west and north-south data transfer flows.

An enhanced version of open-source Istio (as opposed to a fork), Gloo Mesh Enterprise also includes an extended version of the Envoy Proxy. This enables the consistent configuration and orchestration of services across multiple VMs, clusters, clouds, and data centers from a single point of control. Focusing on ease of use, Gloo Mesh Enterprise validates upstream Istio software and incorporates built-in best practices—including role-based APIs—for extensibility and security .

Gloo Mesh is designed to simplify the operations and lifecycle management of multi-cloud, multi-mesh environments, providing both graphical and command-line UIs, multi-cluster observability, and debugging tools.

While the community supports the open-source version of Gloo Mesh, Gloo Mesh Enterprise provides production and long-term support (LTS) with patches and backported hotfixes for the last five releases (N-4) of validated upstream Istio implementations with dedicated SLAs. In addition to traditional support channels, Solo.io also provides a Slack-based support channel for customers.

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LPWAN providers offer network-as-a-service IoT connectivity solutions, managing the network stack on the customer’s behalf and providing widespread geographical coverage. As long as the provider has coverage within the required areas, a customer deploying an IoT solution would only need to purchase suitable connected devices and onboard them onto the provider’s network. The LPWAN provider will supply customers with a portal that reports on the data collected by the sensors as well as the option to forward the sensor data to the customer’s applications or cloud environments.

LPWANs can operate in either the licensed or unlicensed spectrum. To communicate in the licensed frequencies, network providers need to have purchased the right from the relevant telecommunications regulator, which is typically expensive and poses a high entry barrier, so is almost exclusively available to large mobile network operators (MNOs).

For this report, we are looking at LPWAN providers in the unlicensed spectrum, who operate in the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency bands that can be used by anybody without the need to purchase spectrum licenses.

LPWAN connectivity is suitable for applications with the following requirements:

• Long-range (5-10 km / 3-6 miles) wireless connectivity from device to gateway
• Low-power consumption, device battery life lasting up to ten years
• Terrain and building penetration to circumvent line-of-sight issues
• Low operational costs (device management or connection subscription cost)
• Small data transfers of up to ~20kbps
• Device location tracking

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