Welcome to Tetrate Service Bridge!

As you set out on your journey with TSB, it's essential for you to understand its architecture, and how it's going to work within your environment.

The concepts section will take you through:
✓ Tetrate Service Bridge Terminology
✓ An introduction to Tetrate Service Bridge architecture
✓ Using Tetrate Service Bridge for traffic management
✓ Explain the security capabilities within Tetrate Service Bridge
✓ Show you the observability tools available in Tetrate Service Bridge.

How does TSB work?

Tetrate Service Bridge is a service mesh management plane designed to sit on top of your infrastructure and provide you with a single place to manage and configure networking, security and observability for your entire mesh-managed environment.

TSB does this by creating logical views of your environment by grouping resources into ‘services’, ‘workspaces’, and ‘groups’ so that they’re easier to manage. And, because TSB maps to your existing organizational structure, assigning policies and access rights to teams and individuals so that they can access those resources is a straightforward click of a button.

TSB does this by:
✓ Encouraging you to create ‘tenants’ within your business, using your corporate directory to synchronize user accounts and teams, and allows you to…
✓ Define fine-grained access control, editing rights for resources and zero trust as standard. So that you can monitor everything that goes on within your environment, and...
✓ Audit changes to services and shared resources from start to finish -- regardless of whether they’re approved or denied. So...
✓ When you author configuration changes, you only push the change once, because TSB has enabled you to group them into ‘services’, which helps with…
✓ Creating isolated failure domains out of each cluster by giving them their own Istio control plane and gateway, to prevent an issue in one cluster negatively impacting another. It makes your applications more reliable, however if something does go wrong in your application...
✓ Standardized observability and telemetry with Envoy and Istio-based observability, plus Apache Skywalking and Zipkin makes it easier to find out what went wrong and where in near real-time.

It’s a one-stop-shop for managing a heterogeneous environment of Kubernetes, Virtual Machines, Bare Metal servers, on-premises and cloud all in one place, and in a standardized, controlled way.

How’s it built?

Later pages will explain the architecture and specifics of Tetrate Service Bridge, but at a high-level, Tetrate Service Bridge is built on top of open source projects Envoy Proxy and Istio, which bring with them a host of powerful capabilities that make managing microservices-based environments easier. You’ll also have Zipkin and Apache Skywalking as standard for the strongest observability possible.

Tetrate actively participates in the open source communities of the projects it builds upon, and helps navigate the projects into the future with the interests of its customers in mind.

Tetrate Service Bridge uses these open source technologies as a base for creating an opinionated service mesh offering that is best suited to solving the problems you encounter in a modern enterprise environment, and ensures that it’s adaptable to your organization as it is now, and will move with you as you grow and change.

What to take away

There’s a lot going on in TSB, and it’s all been designed with enterprise users and experiences in mind. Learn more about TSB’s architecture, in the next section of the docs, or try it out for yourself in a demo environment.