Fabric

Grey Matter Fabric powers the zero-trust hybrid service mesh, and consists of the Edge, Control, Security, and Sidecar. Use Fabric to connect services built with any language, framework, or runtime environment.

Get a refresher on how Fabric fits into Grey Matter's architecture.

Core Components

Edge

Note: the Grey Matter Edge and Grey Matter Sidecar are the same binary configured differently based on north/south and east/west access patterns.

The Grey Matter Edge handles north/south traffic flowing through the mesh. You can configure multiple edge nodes based on throughput or regulatory requirements, requiring segmented routing or security policy rules. These include:

• Traffic flow management in and out of the hybrid mesh

• Hybrid cloud jump points

• Load balancing and protocol control

• Edge OAuth security

Control

Grey Matter Control is a microservice that performs the following functions within Fabric:

• Automatic discovery throughout your hybrid mesh

• Templated static or dynamic sidecar configuration

• Telemetry and observable collection and aggregation

• Neural net brain

• API for advanced control

Simple deployment architecture.

Learn more about Grey Matter Control here.

Security

Fabric offers the following security features:

• Verifies that tokens presented by the invoking service are trusted for such operations

• Performs operations on behalf of a trusted third party within the Hybrid Mesh

Sidecar

The Grey Matter Sidecar is a deployment strategy that uses the Grey Matter Proxy. Add Grey Matter to your microservices by deploying a sidecar proxy throughout your environment. This sidecar intercepts all network communication between microservices.

Reminder: the Grey Matter Edge and Grey Matter Sidecar are the same binary configured differently based on north/south and east/west access patterns.

The Grey Matter Sidecar offers the following capabilities:

• Multiple protocol support

• Observable events for all traffic and content streams

• Filter SDK

• Certified, Tested, Production-Ready Sidecars

• Native support for gRPC, HTTP/1, HTTP/2, and TCP

Sidecar's Control Plane Functionality

Once you've deployed the Grey Matter Sidecar, you can configure and manage Grey Matter with its control plane functionality:

• Automatic load balancing for HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, and TCP traffic

• Fine-grained control of traffic behavior with rich routing rules, retries, failover, and fault injection

• A policy layer and configuration API supporting access controls, rate limits and quotas

• Automatic metrics, logs, and traces for all traffic within a cluster, including cluster ingress and egress

• Secure service-to-service communication in a cluster with strong identity-based authentication and authorization

Need a refresher on gRPC Protocol?

• gRPC is an RPC protocol implemented on top of HTTP/2

• HTTP/2 is a Layer 7 (Application layer) protocol that runs on top of a TCP (Layer 4 - Transport layer) protocol

• TCP runs on top of IP (Layer 3 - Network layer) protocol

Questions

Want to learn more about Grey Matter Fabric? Contact us at info@deciphernow.com to discuss your use case.