Table of Contents
- Solution Overview
- Key Feature Analysis
- Emerging Feature Analysis
- Business Criteria Analysis
- Solution Snapshot
- About Darrel Kent
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Solution Overview
This GigaOm Solution Brief was commissioned by Greymatter.io and is based on the GigaOm Radar Report for Service Mesh, 2024.
Greymatter.io
Founded in 2015, Greymatter.io specializes in managing, securing, and optimizing the performance of applications and services across hybrid, multicloud, and on-premises environments. Its platform integrates service mesh capabilities, API management, and infrastructure intelligence.
Greymatter.io leverages a decentralized architecture with distributed control planes and distributed data planes. The control planes handle critical tasks such as service discovery, configuration management, and policy enforcement for specific network segments, while the Envoy-based data plane manages traffic routing, load balancing, and security enforcement. The control plane acts as a decision point for security policies across applications, APIs, data sources, and microservices, ensuring compliance with NIST zero-trust guidelines, while the data plane enforces these policies and acts as an information point closest to the resource.
The platform offers a comprehensive service connectivity framework to secure, monitor, and optimize distributed applications across hybrid, multicloud, and sovereign cloud environments, ensuring seamless communication and observability. It includes support for both sidecar and sidecarless implementations.
Key security features include automated mutual transport layer security (mTLS) for encrypted communication and ephemeral certificate management for dynamic, short-lived certificates, and SPIFFE/SPIRE integration for secure service identity. Greymatter.io supports advanced traffic management features, including dynamic routing based on real-time traffic conditions, load balancing, and fault injection.
Greymatter.io also enhances security and operational efficiency by offering comprehensive audit trails, dynamic policy enforcement, and integration with tools like security information and event management (SIEM); security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR); and endpoint detection and response (EDR). These enable robust incident detection and response capabilities.
The platform simplifies configuration management through CUE-based policies and playbooks, reducing configuration code by up to 90% compared to JSON, YAML, or Helm charts. This approach streamlines operations, enabling consistent policy enforcement, configuration management playbooks, and lifecycle management across all environments, from cloud systems to edge deployments. Greyymatter.io also provides predefined templates and workflows that automate routine tasks, reducing operational overhead and minimizing configuration errors.
How to Read This Report
The GigaOm Solution Brief concisely analyzes a vendor’s offering in a specific market. It builds on the framework developed in GigaOm’s Key Criteria and Radar reports and outlines how a vendor performs against three primary decision criteria:
- Key features differentiate solutions and highlight the primary criteria to consider when evaluating a streaming data platform solution.
- Emerging features show how well each vendor implements capabilities that are not yet mainstream but are expected to become more widespread and compelling within the next 12 to 18 months.
- Business criteria provide insight into the nonfunctional requirements that factor into a purchase decision and determine a solution’s impact on an organization.
The specific decision criteria applied in this report are summarized below. The corresponding report GigaOm Key Criteria for Service Mesh provides more detailed descriptions of these criteria. In contrast, the corresponding report GigaOm Radar for Service Mesh provides a complete assessment of vendor solutions.
Purchase Considerations and Use Cases
Greymatter.io is sold as an annual software subscription, with licensing based on the specific platform components used—Fabric, Sense, Data, Data Mesh-Enabled Microservices, and Standard Managed Microservices—as well as expected use cases, connections, APIs, data sources, or repositories. Support licenses are also available.
Use cases for Greymatter.io include secure service-to-service communication across multiple clouds, clusters, and hybrid environments, ensuring flexibility and scalability regardless of the underlying infrastructure. The platform supports zero-trust security enforcement and compliance, API management, real-time infrastructure intelligence, and observability through detailed telemetry data.
Table 1. Target Market and User Segment Comparison
Target Market and User Segment Comparison
Target Market |
Deployment Model |
||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Vendor |
CSP | NSP | MSP | Large Enterprise | SMB | Single or Multiple Cluster | Single or Multiple Network | Single or Multiple Control Plane | Single or Multiple Mesh |
| Greymatter.io | |||||||||