A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that facilitates communication between application components. Meshes provide functionality including service discovery, load balancing, and observability. Service meshes are generally found in distributed systems composed of microservices. The mesh provides a way for different services to exchange data.
What is service mesh in microservices?
A service mesh is a software infrastructure layer for controlling and monitoring internal, service-to-service traffic in microservices applications. Service mesh provides some of the middleware and some of the components that enable service-to-service communication, such as dynamic discovery.
Do you really need a service mesh?
Do you really need a service mesh? The challenges involved in deploying and managing microservices have led to the creation of the service mesh, a tool for adding observability, security, and traffic management capabilities at the application layer.
What is a service mesh like Linkerd?
A service mesh like Linkerd manages this complexity with a wide array of powerful techniques: circuit-breaking, latency-aware load balancing, eventually consistent (“advisory”) service discovery, retries, and deadlines.
How do you control a service mesh?
The control plane of a service mesh is usually human-operated through a command-line interface (CLI), web portal, or some other kind of user interface. What is a sidecar proxy? A service mesh is, essentially, a mesh of network proxies.
Do you really need a service mesh?
Service Mesh is an optional package, and integration is not mandatory. But service mesh is an essential management system that helps all the different pods to work in harmony.
What is the use of service mesh?
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer built into an application that controls service-to-service communication in a microservices architecture. It controls the delivery of service requests to other services, performs load balancing, encrypts data, and discovers other services.
Why do I need service mesh Kubernetes?
Service mesh in Kubernetes enables services to detect each other and communicate. It also uses intelligent routing to control API calls and the flow of traffic between endpoints and services. This further enables canaries or rolling upgrades, blue/green, and other advanced deployment strategies.
What problem does a service mesh solve?
A service mesh solves some of the challenges introduced by distributed microservices by abstracting necessary functions (service discovery, connection encryption, error and failure handling, and latency detection and response) to a separate entity called proxy.
What is service mesh in simple terms?
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that controls service-to-service communication over a network. This method enables separate parts of an application to communicate with each other. Service meshes appear commonly in concert with cloud-based applications, containers and microservices.
What are different types of service mesh?
Popular service meshes include: Linkerd, Istio, Consul, Kuma, and Maesh. Supporting technologies within this space include: Layer 7-aware proxies, such as Envoy, HAProxy, NGINX, and MOSN; and service mesh orchestration, visualization, and understandability tooling, such as SuperGloo, Kiali, and Dive.
Is Kafka a service mesh?
Companies use Kafka together with service mesh implementations like Envoy, Linkerd or Istio already today. You can easily combine them to add security, enforce rate limiting, or implement other related use cases.
Is service mesh only for microservices?
While the service mesh pattern was designed to handle network connectivity between microservices, it can also be applied to other architectures (monolithic, mini-services, serverless) wherever there are multiple services communicating across a network.
Why do you need Istio when you already have Kubernetes?
Istio makes traffic management transparent to the application, moving this functionality out of the application and into the platform layer as a cloud native infrastructure. Istio complements Kubernetes, by enhancing its traffic management, observability and security for cloud native applications.
Is service mesh same as service discovery?
A service mesh works with a service discovery protocol to detect services as they come up. Then, the mesh ages them gracefully when they disappear. Service discovery is a container management framework that keeps a list of instances that are ready to receive requests – or be discovered – by other services.
What are the advantages of Istio?
Istio enables organizations to secure, connect, and monitor microservices, so they can modernize their enterprise apps more swiftly and securely. Istio manages traffic flows between services, enforces access policies, and aggregates telemetry data, all without requiring changes to application code.
What is Mesh API?
The API Mesh as a concept was first introduced briefly in a Kong case study as a “configuration-driven and highly flexible set of gateways and pathways” that act as “connective tissue between availability zones” - the data centres or clouds that host its applications.
What is service mesh in AWS?
AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. App Mesh gives end-to-end visibility and high-availability for your applications.
Is service mesh only for microservices?
While the service mesh pattern was designed to handle network connectivity between microservices, it can also be applied to other architectures (monolithic, mini-services, serverless) wherever there are multiple services communicating across a network.
What is API service mesh?
API gateways manage requests that originate externally, such as a request by an application user to view a certain page. In contrast, service meshes handle the internal requests that microservices make to other microservices within an application.
What is service mesh in Azure?
A service mesh provides capabilities like traffic management, resiliency, policy, security, strong identity, and observability to your workloads. Your application is decoupled from these operational capabilities and the service mesh moves them out of the application layer, and down to the infrastructure layer.
What is a service mesh?
A service mesh is a software infrastructure layer for controlling and monitoring internal, service-to-service traffic in microservices applications.
How does a service mesh work?
One of the key aspects of how a service mesh works is that it leverages a sidecar design pattern. Services communicate and handle requests via a proxy, which is dynamically injected into each pod. Envoy is one of the most popular proxies and is being used within service meshes for its performance, extensibility, and API facilities.
What are the features of a service mesh?
One of the most popular open-source service meshes breaks these features down into four pillars: features to connect, secure, control, and observe. In the connect pillar, also referred to as traffic management, you get some of the advanced capabilities you might need if you’re versioning microservices and need to be able to handle various failure scenarios. The next two pillars, secure and control, are sometimes simply referred to as security. This is where a mesh provides facilities to secure traffic with mutual TLS authentication, and enforce policies on that traffic in terms of service-to-service communication. Lastly, the observe pillar covers observability features, including sidecar proxies being able to collect telemetry and logs around how services within a mesh communicate with one another.
What is service level observability?
Service-level observability – Visibility into how workloads and services are communicating at the application layer. By design, Kubernetes is a multi-tenant environment. As more workloads and services are deployed, it becomes harder to understand how everything is working together, especially if an organization is embracing a microservices-based architecture. Service teams want to understand what their upstream and downstream dependencies are.
What are the three main use cases driving interest in service mesh adoption?
Through conversations with DevOps teams and platform and service owners, we’ve found that there are three main use cases driving interest in service mesh adoption: security/encryption, service-level observability, and service-level control.
Can you monitor egress traffic?
For example, if you want to have a security team manage certain tiers that might be geared toward PCI compliance, or monitor egress traffic and compare it against known threat feeds, you can easily do so. What’s more, you can put those policies in place without interfering with what you might want to enable your application and development teams to do for east-west traffic and service-to-service communication, which service mesh typically handles.
Is mesh a deterrent?
While these are the main drivers for adoption, the complexity involved in achieving them through use of a service mesh can be a deterrent for many organizations and teams.
What Does a Service Mesh Actually Do?
A service mesh like Linkerd manages this complexity with a wide array of powerful techniques: circuit-breaking, latency-aware load balancing, eventually consistent (“advisory”) service discovery, retries, and deadlines. These features must all work in conjunction, and the interactions between these features and the complex environment in which they operate can be quite subtle.
What Is a Service Mesh?
A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for handling service-to-service communication. It’s responsible for the reliable delivery of requests through the complex topology of services that comprise a modern, cloud native application. In practice, the service mesh is typically implemented as an array of lightweight network proxies that are deployed alongside application code, without the application needing to be aware. (But there are variations to this idea, as we’ll see.)
Is service mesh a cloud native?
While service mesh adoption in the cloud native ecosystem is growing rapidly, there is an extensive and exciting roadmap ahead still to be explored. The requirements for serverless computing (e.g. Amazon’s Lambda) fit directly into the service mesh’s model of naming and linking, and form a natural extension of its role in the cloud native ecosystem. The role of service identity and access policy are still very nascent in cloud native environments, and the service mesh is well poised to play a fundamental part of the story here. Finally, the service mesh, like TCP/IP before it, will continue to be pushed further into the underlying infrastructure. Just as Linkerd evolved from systems like Finagle, the current incarnation of the service as a separate, user-space proxy that must be explicitly added to a cloud native stack will also continue to evolve.
Is the Service Mesh a Networking Model?
The service mesh is a networking model that sits at a layer of abstraction above TCP/IP. It assumes that the underlying L3/L4 network is present and capable of delivering bytes from point to point. (It also assumes that this network, as with every other aspect of the environment, is unreliable; the service mesh must therefore also be capable of handling network failures.)
What is service mesh?
Service mesh is ideally for multicloud scenarios since it offers a single abstraction layer that obscures the specifics of the underlying cloud. Enterprises can set policies with the service mesh and have them enforced across different cloud providers.
What is a sidecar in a service mesh?
The sidecar is attached to a parent application and provides supporting features for the application. The sidecar also shares the same life cycle as the parent application, being created and retired alongside the parent.
What is operation reliability?
Operation reliability: Metrics data from service mesh allows you to see how your services are performing — for example, how long did it take it to respond to service requests and how much resource it is using. This data is useful to detect issues and correct them.
What is a user interface?
User Interface is comprised of a command line interface (CLI) (linkerd) and a web UI. The CLI runs on your local machine; the web UI is hosted by the control plane.
Can you enforce TLS for service to service?
Secure service-to-service communications: You can enforce mutual TLS for service-to-service communications for all your service in mesh. Also you can enforce service-level authentication using either TLS or JSON web tokens.
Can service mesh be granted based on location?
Access control: With service mesh, you can assign policy that a service request can be granted only based on the location where the request came and can only succeed if the requester passes the health check.
Why is a service mesh important?
That’s because a service mesh also captures every aspect of service-to-service communication as performance metrics. Over time, data made visible by the service mesh can be applied to the rules for interservice communication, resulting in more efficient and reliable service requests.
Why is it difficult to locate problems without a service mesh?
That’s because a service mesh also captures every aspect of service-to-service communication as performance metrics.
What is service to service communication?
Service-to-service communication is what makes microservices possible. The logic governing communication can be coded into each service without a service mesh layer—but as communication gets more complex, a service mesh becomes more valuable. For cloud-native apps built in a microservices architecture, a service mesh is a way to comprise a large number of discrete services into a functional application.
Why is it hard to diagnose microservice failures?
It also means communication failures are harder to diagnose because the logic that governs interservice communication is hidden within each service.
What is microservices architecture?
A microservices architecture lets developers make changes to an app’s services without the need for a full redeploy. Unlike app development in other architectures, individual microservices are built by small teams with the flexibility to choose their own tools and coding languages.
What is an app service?
Each part of an app, called a "service," relies on other services to give users what they want. If a user of an online retail app wants to buy something, they need to know if the item is in stock. So, the service that communicates with the company's inventory database needs to communicate with the product webpage, which itself needs to communicate with the user’s online shopping cart. To add business value, this retailer might eventually build a service that gives users in-app product recommendations. This new service will communicate with a database of product tags to make recommendations, but it also needs to communicate with the same inventory database that the product page needed—it’s a lot of reusable, moving parts.
What is the impact of every new service added to an app?
Every new service added to an app, or new instance of an existing service running in a container, complicates the communication environment and introduces new points of possible failure. Within a complex microservices architecture, it can become nearly impossible to locate where problems have occurred without a service mesh.
What is a service mesh?
A service mesh is an architectural pattern for microservices deployments. It’s primary goal is to make service-to-service communications secure, fast, and reliable.
Why are microservices important?
The reasons are well documented — monolithic architectures are hard to develop and maintain, while microservices allow for greater agility with smaller, targeted services.
What is MuleSoft microservices?
MuleSoft customers can realize a microservices architecture using Anypoint Platform and an API-led approach. These microservices leverage the Mule runtime engine, and become a part of the customers application network — a way to connect applications, data, and devices through APIs. Anypoint Platform already brings full lifecycle API and service-management capabilities to support your application network.
Can microservices be used alone?
However, microservices can’t function alone — they often work together to compose larger applications. As organizations build out more microservices, often using different languages and deployment models, they end up with complex environments that can be costly and difficult to operate.
What is service mesh?
A service mesh provides a consistent way to connect, secure and observe microservices. Most service meshes are tightly integrated with an orchestration platform, commonly Kubernetes. There’s no way around it; a service mesh is another thing, and at least part of your team will have to learn it. That’s a cost, and you should compare ...
How many microservices are needed for service mesh?
In my experience, teams often realize they need a consistent approach once they have five or six microservices. However, many users push to a dozen or more microservices before they notice the increasing cost of utility code and the increasing complexity of slight differences across their applications. And, of course, some organizations continue scaling and never choose a service mesh at all, investing in application libraries and tooling instead. On the other hand, we also work with early birds that want to get ahead of the rising complexity wave and introduce service mesh before they’ve got half-a-dozen microservices. But the number of microservices you have isn’t the only part to consider. You’ll also want to consider urgency and timing.
What protocols are not served by existing service meshes?
You use application protocols that are not served by existing service meshes (so usually not HTTP, HTTP/2, gRPC).
Who is the CTO of Aspen Mesh?
Aspen Mesh sponsored this post. Andrew Jenkins. Andrew, Aspen Mesh’s CTO, co-founded Aspen Mesh because he observed containerized microservices making communication resiliency ever more important, but also more challenging to build and manage at scale. His software and hardware engineering background is in communication ...
What is a microservice written in?
Your microservices are all written in one language (“monoglot”) by developers in your organization, building from a common framework.
What Is A Service Mesh?
Is The Service Mesh A Networking Model?
- The service mesh is a networking model that sits at a layer of abstraction above TCP/IP. It assumes that the underlying L3/L4 network is present and capable of delivering bytes from point to point. (It also assumes that this network, as with every other aspect of the environment, is unreliable; the service mesh must therefore also be capable of handling network failures.) In so…
What Does A Service Mesh Actually do?
- Reliably delivering requests in a cloud native application can be incredibly complex. A service mesh like Linkerdmanages this complexity with a wide array of powerful techniques: circuit-breaking, latency-aware load balancing, eventually consistent (“advisory”) service discovery, retries, and deadlines. These features must all work in conjunction, and the interactions betwee…
Why Is The Service Mesh Necessary?
- The service mesh is ultimately not an introduction of new functionality, but rather a shift in where functionality is located. Web applications have always had to manage the complexity of service communication. The origins of the service mesh model can be traced in the evolution of these applications over the past decade and a half. Consider the typical architecture of a medium-size…
The Future of The Service Mesh
- While service mesh adoption in the cloud native ecosystem is growing rapidly, there is an extensive and exciting roadmap ahead still to be explored. The requirements for serverless computing (e.g. Amazon’s Lambda) fit directly into the service mesh’s model of naming and linking, and form a natural extension of its role in the cloud native ecosystem. The roles of servic…
Conclusion
- The service mesh is a critical component of the cloud native stack. A little more than one year from its launch, Linkerd is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and has a thriving community of contributors and users. Adopters range from startups like Monzo, which is disrupting the UK banking industry, to high scale Internet companies like Paypal, Ticketmaster, a…
What Is A Service Mesh?
Service Mesh Architecture
- One of the key aspects of how a service mesh works is that it leverages a sidecar design pattern. Services communicate and handle requests via a proxy, which is dynamically injected into each pod. Envoy is one of the most popular proxies and is being used within service meshes for its performance, extensibility, and API facilities. While this design pattern of a sidecar proxy makes …
Service Mesh Features
- Service mesh provides a powerful but complex set of features. One of the most popular open-source service meshes breaks these features down into four pillars: features to connect, secure, control, and observe. In the connect pillar, also referred to as traffic management, you get some of the advanced capabilities you might need if you’re versioning microservices and need to be able …
Service Mesh Challenges
- The two main challenges posed by service mesh are complexity and performance. In terms of complexity, service mesh is difficult to set up and manage. It requires specialized skills, and includes capabilities that most users don’t need. Because service mesh introduces latency, it can also create performance issues. Many of the challenges associated with service mesh stem fro…
Main Drivers of Adoption
- Through conversations with DevOps teams and platform and service owners, we’ve found that there are three main use cases driving interest in service mesh adoption: security/encryption, service-level observability, and service-level control. 1. Security/encryption – Security for data in transit within a cluster. Sometimes this is driven by industry-specific regulatory concerns, such a…
An Operationally Simpler Approach
- Platform owners, DevOps teams, and SREs have limited resources, so adopting a service mesh is a significant undertaking due to the resources required for configuration and operation. Calico enables a single-pane-of-glass unified control to address the three most popular service mesh use cases—security, observability, and control—with an operationally simpler approach, while avoidi…
Summary
- So… Do you really need a service mesh? In my opinion, if security and observability are your primary drivers, the answer is no. Calico provides granular observability and security—not just at the application layer, but across the full stack—while avoiding the operational complexities and overhead often associated with deploying a service mesh. Want to learn more? Get started with …
What Is A Service Mesh?
Is The Service Mesh A Networking Model?
- The service mesh is a networking model that sits at a layer of abstraction above TCP/IP. It assumes that the underlying L3/L4 network is present and capable of delivering bytes from point to point. (It also assumes that this network, as with every other aspect of the environment, is unreliable; the service mesh must therefore also be capable of handling network failures.) In so…
What Does A Service Mesh Actually do?
- Reliably delivering requests in a cloud native application can be incredibly complex. A service mesh like Linkerdmanages this complexity with a wide array of powerful techniques: circuit-breaking, latency-aware load balancing, eventually consistent (“advisory”) service discovery, retries, and deadlines. These features must all work in conjunction, and the interactions betwee…
Why Is The Service Mesh Necessary?
- The service mesh is ultimately not an introduction of new functionality, but rather shift in where functionality is located. Web applications have always had to manage the complexity of service communication. The origins of the service mesh model can be traced in the evolution of these applications over the past decade and a half. Consider the typical architecture of a medium-size…
The Future of The Service Mesh
- While service mesh adoption in the cloud native ecosystem is growing rapidly, there is an extensive and exciting roadmap ahead still to be explored. The requirements for serverless computing (e.g. Amazon’s Lambda) fit directly into the service mesh’s model of naming and linking, and form a natural extension of its role in the cloud native ecosystem. The role of servic…
Conclusion
- The service mesh is a critical component of the cloud native stack. A little more than one year from its launch, Linkerd is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and has a thriving community of contributors and users. Adopters range from startups like Monzo, which is disrupting the UK banking industry, to high scale Internet companies like Paypal, Ticketmaster, a…