Cilium Mesh: A new way to extend Kubernetes benefits across on-premises and cloud networking

Commentary: Networking has long been the holdout for enterprises looking to go cloud native, but Cilium Mesh promises to seamlessly blend legacy infrastructure with cloud-native infrastructure.

Networking has long been the holdout in enterprise aspirations toward high-performance, multicloud or hybrid architectures. While such architectures were once aspirational marketing buzzwords, they are today’s enterprise reality. Now, with the launch of Cilium Mesh, enterprises get “a new universal networking layer to connect workloads and machines across cloud, on-prem and edge.” Consisting of a Kubernetes networking component, a multi-cluster connectivity plane and a transit gateway, Cilium Mesh helps enterprises bridge their on-premises networking assets into a cloud-native world.

It sounds cool, and it is cool, but reaching this point was anything but simple. It also remains complex for enterprises hoping to bridge their existing infrastructure to more modern approaches.

Sometimes we take for granted cloud-native architectures because we ...