Why Service Meshes, Orchestrators Are Do or Die for Cloud Native Deployments
Aspen Mesh sponsored this post.
The self-contained, ephemeral nature of microservices comes with some serious upside, but keeping track of every single one is a challenge, especially when trying to figure out how the rest are affected when a single microservice goes down. The end result is that if you’re operating or developing in a microservices architecture, there’s a good chance part of your days are spent wondering what the hell your services are up to.
With the adoption of microservices, problems also emerge due to the sheer number of services that exist in large systems. Problems like security, load balancing, monitoring and rate limiting that had to be solved once for a monolith, now have to be handled separately for each service.
The good news is that engineers love a good challenge. And almost as quickly as they are creating new problems with microservices, they are addressing those problems with emerging microservices tools and technology patterns. Maybe the emergence of microservices is just a smart play by engineers to ensure job security.
Today’s cloud native darling, Kubernetes, eases many of the challenges that come with microservices. Auto-scheduling, horizontal scaling and service discovery solve the majority of build-and-deploy problems you’ll encounter with microservices.
What Kubernetes leaves unsolved is a few key containerized application runtime issues. That’s where a service mesh steps in. Let’s take a look at what Kubernetes provides, and how Istio adds to Kubernetes to solve the microservices runtime issues.
Kubernetes Solves Build-and-Deploy Challenges
Container orchestration tools, such as Kubernetes, manage many of the build-and-deploy challenges that come with containerized applications.
Kubernetes supports a microservice architecture by enabling developers to abstract away the functionality of a set of pods, and expose services to other developers through a well-defined API. Kubernetes enables L4 load balancing, but it doesn’t help with higher-level problems, such as L7 metrics, traffic splitting, rate limiting and circuit breaking.
Service Mesh Addresses Challenges of Managing Traffic at Runtime
Service mesh helps address many of the challenges that arise when your application is being consumed by the end user. Being able to monitor what services are communicating with each other, if those communications are secure and being able to control the service-to-service communication in your clusters are key to ensuring applications are running securely and resiliently.
Istio also provides a consistent view across a microservices architecture by generating uniform metrics throughout. It removes the need to reconcile different types of metrics emitted by various runtime agents, or add arbitrary agents to gather metrics for legacy un-instrumented apps. It adds a level of observability across your polyglot services and clusters that is unachievable at such a fine-grained level with any other tool.
Istio also adds a much deeper level of security. While Kubernetes only provides basic secret distribution and control-plane certificate management, Istio provides mTLS capabilities so you can encrypt on the wire traffic to ensure your service-to-service communications are secure.
A Match Made in Heaven
Pairing Kubernetes with a service mesh-like Istio gives you the best of both worlds and since Istio was made to run on Kubernetes, the two work together seamlessly. You can use Kubernetes to manage all of your build and deploy needs and Istio takes care of the important runtime issues.
Kubernetes has matured to a point that most enterprises are using it for container orchestration. Currently, there are 74 CNCF-certified service providers — which is a testament to the fact that there is a large and growing market. I see Istio as an extension of Kubernetes and a next step to solving more challenges in what feels like a single package.
Already, Istio is quickly maturing and is starting to see more adoption in the enterprise. It’s likely that in 2019 we will see Istio emerge as the service mesh standard for enterprises in much the same way Kubernetes has emerged as the standard for container orchestration.
Feature image via Pixabay.