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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 / Serverless / Service Mesh

CNCF Survey Snapshot: Tech Adoption in the Cloud Native World

5 Mar 2020 11:03am, by Lawrence E Hecht

Service Mesh

Istio and the Race for Service Mesh Dominance

2 Mar 2020 1:06pm, by Lawrence E Hecht

Service Mesh

Survey Results: Service Mesh Useful for Security, Observability and Traffic Control

27 Feb 2020 9:22am, by Lawrence E Hecht

Kubernetes / Microservices / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

When You Do (and Don’t) Need a Service Mesh

26 Feb 2020 1:45pm, by Andrew Jenkins

Kubernetes / Security / Service Mesh

Tell Us About Your Service Mesh Usage

13 Feb 2020 9:10am, by Lawrence E Hecht

Microservices / Networking / Service Mesh

How Much Will App Services Like Service Mesh Grow?

13 Feb 2020 7:20am, by Lawrence E Hecht

Security / Service Mesh

Urgent Patch: Istio Authentication Vulnerability Could Leave Sensitive Data Exposed

12 Feb 2020 2:14pm, by Joab Jackson

Networking / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

Part 4: When a ‘Service Mesh Lite’ Proxy Is Right for Your Organization

5 Feb 2020 11:35am, by Pankaj Gupta

Microservices / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

Part 3: The Best Way to Select a Proxy Architecture for Microservices Application Delivery

16 Jan 2020 1:25pm, by Pankaj Gupta

DevOps / Kubernetes / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

How Service Mesh Can Make Application Delivery More Secure

16 Jan 2020 10:35am, by Shawn Wormke

Cloud Native / Service Mesh / Contributed

Unlocking Potential: Optimizing the Usability and Performance of Istio 1.4

9 Jan 2020 9:12am, by Karen Bruner

Containers / Security / Service Mesh

Portshift Takes Vulnerabilities Management to the Container Level

26 Dec 2019 9:32am, by Mike Melanson

Development / Service Mesh

Solo.io Promises Docker-Like Experience with a WebAssembly Hub for Envoy Extensions

17 Dec 2019 11:05am, by Mike Melanson

Cloud Native / Kubernetes / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

The Top 3 Service Mesh Developments in 2020

12 Dec 2019 9:13am, by Zach Jory

Networking / Service Mesh

HashiCorp’s Consul Brings Namespace Management to the Service Mesh

10 Dec 2019 1:44pm, by Joab Jackson

Kubernetes / Networking / Service Mesh

F5 and NGINX: Going Forward with Kubernetes

10 Dec 2019 11:40am, by Susan Hall

Microservices / Networking / Service Mesh / Sponsored / Contributed

Part 1: The Best Way to Select a Proxy Architecture for Microservices Application Delivery

9 Dec 2019 12:36pm, by Pankaj Gupta

Kubernetes / Service Mesh / Sponsored

Pancake Podcast: Which Comes First, Kubernetes or the Service Mesh?

28 Nov 2019 10:40am, by TNS Staff

Service Mesh / Technology / Sponsored

Kuma: Kong’s Simpler Service Mesh, for VMs and Kubernetes

25 Nov 2019 2:18pm, by Emily Omier

Microservices / Service Mesh / Sponsored

With Gloo Enterprise 1.0, Solo.io Builds the Stepping Stones to Service Mesh

21 Nov 2019 1:29pm, by Jennifer Riggins

Microservices / Service Mesh / Sponsored

Buoyant Launches Dive, a ‘Team Control Plane’ for Microservice Identification

21 Nov 2019 9:00am, by Mike Melanson

Cloud Native / Service Mesh / Sponsored

Solo.io’s Autopilot: A Framework for Automating Service Mesh Operations

20 Nov 2019 8:36am, by Joab Jackson

Kubernetes / Security / Service Mesh / Sponsored

Portshift Attempts ‘More Granular’ Security for What Istio Service Meshes Lack

18 Nov 2019 10:26pm, by B. Cameron Gain

Kubernetes / Service Mesh / Sponsored

Cloudflow: A Framework for Streaming Data Pipelines on Kubernetes

18 Nov 2019 12:36pm, by Susan Hall

Culture / Service Mesh / Tools / Sponsored / Contributed

The Art of the Service Mesh Policy

17 Nov 2019 4:00am, by Andrew Jenkins

Cloud Native / Networking / Service Mesh

Snapt Launches Project Nova, a Scalable Cloud Native Application Delivery Controller

31 Oct 2019 7:14am, by Mike Melanson

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