Overview
Grey Matter is a software platform that provides zero-trust policy compliance, operational insight, and infrastructure management. More concretely, it's a cloud-native infrastructure layer that improves microservice performance and simplifies service mesh operations.
Key Definitions
A microservice is a self-contained process or collection of processes that provide a unique business capability. Microservices act in a modular fashion to improve system reliability, visibility, and security.
A service mesh is a configurable, low‑latency infrastructure layer that provides secure service-to-service communication. It's often implemented as lightweight network proxies deployed alongside application code. These proxies orchestrate the activities of every service or system running within the mesh.
Grey Matter is composed of Fabric, Data, and Sense. Each simplifies the technical challenges associated with microservice management, such as service announcement, service discovery, instrumentation, logging, tracing, troubleshooting, encryption, and access control.
Grey Matter's core features include:
Zero-trust security
Cloud, language, and vendor-agnostic implementations
Automated service-level observability and management
Data governance and policy management
SLO compliance
Root-cause analysis
Business analytics
AIOps
You can use Grey Matter to improve service discovery, build or manage your service mesh, gain business insights, and add zero-trust security to your environment. You can also use Grey Matter to extend your unique use cases.
Read more about our use cases to learn what Grey Matter does.
Grey Matter is composed of Fabric, Data, and Sense. Learn how these components simplify microservice management in Architecture.
Grey Matter uses mesh-generated telemetry data to improve network insight and systems performance from local development, to production-scale container and hybrid cloud implementations.
We take our design cues from open architecture. Our implementations don't require predetermined downstream investments for existing infrastructure. Grey Matter is cloud, language, and platform agnostic.
With Grey Matter you can:
Deploy across any cloud or vendor environment.
Work in concert with existing service mesh environments.
Flex across containers such as DC/OS Mesosphere, OpenShift, or Kubernetes.
Grey Matter captures over 100 service and instance route-level statistics for each service on the mesh.
Fabric, the platform’s core Envoy proxy-based mesh technology, generates and captures telemetry and audit data. This data powers dynamic enterprise policy compliance, and SLO creation and monitoring.
Grey Matter feeds each piece of telemetry and audit data generated throughout the lifetime of a service instance to Grey Matter’s Sense SLO monitoring overlay service. Because Grey Matter maintains the entire history of every event tied to the lifespan of every service on the mesh, the value of SLO monitoring for enterprise IT only grows over time.
Backed by the full lineage of service telemetry data, your team can:
Establish historical patterns of use
Refine SLOs to best reflect real-world performance
Grey Matter is designed with zero-trust security in mind. Our platform manages the activities, policies, security, auditing and data of every microservice in a multi-tenant mesh across any enterprise environment. These zero-trust enforcement features include:
Enabling service-to-service mTLS connections
Scheduled or on-demand key rotation
Service cryptographic identifiers
All actions within Grey Matter (all services, users, and all data objects) are audited, logged, tracked, and recorded. These logs can be stored within Grey Matter, pushed to external or separate storage devices, or automatically triaged and sent to security assessors.
Audit logs compliant with ICS 500-27 standards are automatically provided to your security team. Grey Matter maintains a historical pedigree of every action occurring on the system throughout its lifespan. This data can be provided to auditors and/or security analysts to assist with risk management, data loss, or breach impact mitigation.
Learn more about zero-trust here, or learn how to set up zero-trust for your mesh.
The Grey Matter application is Grey Matter’s single pane of glass for mesh service health monitoring, access, and control. The Grey Matter application enables service level objective (SLO) observability and dynamic control for every service within Grey Matter Fabric. The Grey Matter application visualizes aggregates, routes, and service-level SLOs for the following infrastructure data:
Memory Utilization
CPU Utilization
Percentile Latencies
Error Rate
Request Rate
Grey Matter's telemetry data gives you insight into microservice performance and control over your system's resource use. It offers the following key telemetry backed value-add benefits.
Grey Matter Fabric is the control and data plane responsible for managing the mesh environment. Envoy-proxy backed communications and traffic management, policy enforcement, audit, and data governance take place atop Fabric.
Grey Matter Data is a data store agnostic API designed to manage access control and zero-trust data security policy compliance. Data enables secure global data sharing backed by complex content tagging, object tracking, and security policy. Data is store agnostic, and capable of supporting multiple storage backends to include Amazon S3, CEPH, Gluster, local disk, and more.
Grey Matter includes several open-source tools that improve quality and security, and offer low-cost and flexible ways to meet goals. With Grey Matter, network orchestration and policy management do not require expensive third-party tools and licensing fees.
Want to learn more? Contact us at [email protected] to discuss your specific use case.
