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Service Mesh

▾ 2 MINUTE READ — CLOSE

A fairly recent technology, the service mesh came about as pressures mounted in the industry from the increasing use of Kubernetes and microservices in general. Applications were broken down into smaller containerized services, which all had to communicate with one another, and the outside world, both securely and safely.

The problem with this approach is that it required application developers to add to their apps an entire networking stack to deal with issues like service discovery, routing, circuit breaking, load-balancing, and security authorization. The answer didn’t come in the form of a library that a developer could use because even smaller shops used multiple languages to build their apps.

The service mesh provided an answer to all these by abstracting all of these components into a sidecar, which could be attached to the application and could communicate with all the other sidecars on a network.

A typical service mesh can be divided into two parts, a data plane and a control plane. The data plane deals with the actual traffic from one application to another. Any networking aspects regarding the actual service requests, such as routing, forwarding, load balancing, even authentication and authorization are part of the service mesh data plane. The control plane is the entity that connects the various data planes into a distributed network. This is the policy and management layer of the service mesh.

One of the most popular service mesh packages, Istio is, in itself a control plane, though it uses Envoy as a data plane.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s Linkerd, managed by Buoyant, is another popular service mesh. It was recently rewritten to move the codebase off the chunky Java language to the most nimble combination of Go and Rust. Linkerd 2.0 was also designed to work more smoothly with the Kubernetes container orchestration engine (though contrary to popular belief, a service mesh does not require Kubernetes to run).

In addition to new service mesh packages popping up, a number of network management software stacks have been extended to become full-fledged service meshes, notable the Nginx application server, the Kong API gateway and HashiCorp’s Consul. And because of the early success of the service mesh, there is a growing movement towards creating tools to manage multiple service meshes, including the Service Mesh Interface standardization effort and the Gloo software for service mesh federation.

Because the service mesh is a cloud native technology, we will be following its progress very closely. So bookmark this page for the latest news and views on the service mesh.


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Cloud Native / Networking / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

Istio 1.8: A Virtual Machine Integration Odyssey

6 Jan 2021 12:00pm, by Jimmy Song

Cloud Native / Networking / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

Trying out Istio’s DNS Proxy

18 Dec 2020 10:11am, by Nick Nellis

Service Mesh

When Service Meshes Can Emerge from Envoy/Istio Shadows

17 Dec 2020 1:03pm, by Lawrence E Hecht

Cloud Native / Kubernetes / Service Mesh / Contributed

The Cloud Native Landscape: The Orchestration and Management Layer

15 Dec 2020 11:54am, by Catherine Paganini and Jason Morgan

Cloud Services / Security / Service Mesh / Contributed

Operationalizing Security in a Decentralized, Service-Based Architecture

10 Dec 2020 6:00am, by Jonathan Holmes

Cloud Native / Development / Service Mesh / Sponsored

Teleport, a Unified Access Plane That Serves Cloud Resources to the Developer

9 Dec 2020 1:10pm, by Alex Williams and B. Cameron Gain

Microservices / Networking / Service Mesh / Sponsored

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon: Service Mesh Battle Stories and Fixes

2 Dec 2020 6:00am, by B. Cameron Gain

Kubernetes / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

Istio 1.8: A Smart DNS Proxy Takes Support for Virtual Machines a Step Further

19 Nov 2020 1:00pm, by Jimmy Song

Microservices / Networking / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

gRPC Remote Procedure Calls in a Nutshell

19 Nov 2020 12:00pm, by Kasun Indrasiri

Cloud Native / Networking / Service Mesh

Linkerd Adds Default mTLS to Kubernetes to Enable Zero Trust

13 Nov 2020 7:52am, by Mike Melanson

Cloud Native / Networking / Service Mesh

NGINX Steps into the Service Mesh Fray Promising a Simpler Alternative

28 Oct 2020 7:00am, by Mike Melanson

Kubernetes / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

How to Integrate Virtual Machines into Istio Service Mesh

28 Oct 2020 6:00am, by Jimmy Song

Edge / IoT / Networking / Service Mesh

The New Dimensions of Service Mesh at the Edge

14 Oct 2020 11:19am, by Alex Williams

API Management / Networking / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

5 Ways to Succeed with an API Gateway

12 Oct 2020 12:46pm, by Nick Ramirez

Microservices / Security / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

Zero-Trust Security with Service Mesh

6 Oct 2020 12:00pm, by Rose Sawvel

Cloud Native / Development / Service Mesh

WebAssembly Could Be the Key for Cloud Native Extensibility

25 Sep 2020 1:00pm, by Joab Jackson

Networking / Open Source / Service Mesh

TAYGA: Bridge an IPv6 Network Back to IPv4 using NAT64

25 Sep 2020 10:46am, by Jack Wallen

Development / Open Source / Service Mesh

Solo.io Borrows OCI Spec to Bundle WebAssembly Modules

17 Sep 2020 11:02am, by Mike Melanson

API Management / Data / Service Mesh

Kong Enterprise Focused to Be the ‘Switzerland of Connectivity’

3 Sep 2020 9:29am, by Mike Melanson

Development / Service Mesh

This Week in Programming: Istio Restructures Steering Committee to Avoid Single-Vendor Majority

29 Aug 2020 6:00am, by Mike Melanson

Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Service Mesh

24 Aug 2020 12:13pm, by Peter McCarron and Cody De Arkland

Development / Microservices / Networking / Service Mesh

KubeCon EU: Envoy Looks to WebAssembly to Extend Microservices Monitoring

24 Aug 2020 6:00am, by Jennifer Riggins

Cloud Native / Kubernetes / Service Mesh / Sponsored

How a Service Mesh Amplifies Business Value

12 Aug 2020 2:13pm, by Alex Williams and B. Cameron Gain

Kubernetes / Networking / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

Introducing Contour: Routing Traffic to Applications in Kubernetes

7 Aug 2020 9:35am, by Nick Young and Michael Michael

Cloud Native / Networking / Service Mesh

Microsoft Debuts Open Service Mesh into a Crowded, Contentious Ecosystem

6 Aug 2020 2:26pm, by Mary Branscombe

API Management / Security / Service Mesh / Contributed

Shadow APIs Breaking Your Security? The Enroute API Gateway Could Help

5 Aug 2020 9:03am, by Chintan Thakker

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