Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
HPE isn’t the only company making network acquisitions, Cisco announced back on December 21st that they will be acquiring cloud-native startup Isovalent for an undisclosed sum, which means it isn’t material to their bottom line and therefore they don’t have to tell you.
Cisco participated in previous funding rounds for Isovalent, so it’s not entirely surprising that they have now decided to go all in. Isovalent, for their part, is focused on the paid version of the open-source Cilium project, an eBPF based networking solution for cloud-native (meaning containerized) applications.
The core idea is that Cilium can sit at the kernel-layer and monitor traffic across all the containers on a host, making routing and policy decisions based on rules pushed from a controller. It obviates the need to have a sidecar attached directly to each pod in a Kubernetes cluster, lowering processing overhead and networking complexity.
Cisco has been trying to move away from a pure hardware play for a while now and clearly sees cloud-native applications as the next frontier. The Isovalent acquisition is part of that overall strategy, and I suspect we’ll see Cisco gobble up some other cloud-native startups in 2024. Solo.io you’re on notice.