Knowledge Builders

what is service mesh in kubernetes

by Prof. Jaylen Strosin PhD Published 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago
image

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.

Full Answer

What are service mesh layers in Kubernetes?

In general, service mesh layers on top of your Kubernetes infrastructure and is making communications between services over the network safe and reliable.

What's a service mesh?

What's a service mesh? What's a service mesh? A service mesh, like the open source project Istio, is a way to control how different parts of an application share data with one another. Unlike other systems for managing this communication, a service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer built right into an app.

What is open service mesh (OSM)?

Open Service Mesh (OSM) is a lightweight, extensible, cloud native service mesh that allows users to uniformly manage, secure, and get out-of-the-box observability features for highly dynamic microservice environments. OSM runs an Envoy-based control plane on Kubernetes and can be configured with SMI APIs.

Is there a service mesh for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?

Resist the urge to install everything from the start. As a next step, explore Open Service Mesh (OSM) on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): Learn more about OSM ... You can also explore the following service meshes on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) via the comprehensive project documentation available for each of them:

image

What does service mesh do?

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.

Do I need a service mesh with Kubernetes?

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. Here are several reasons why, you will want to implement service mesh in a Kubernetes environment.

What is service mesh and Istio?

Istio is a service mesh—a modernized service networking layer that provides a transparent and language-independent way to flexibly and easily automate application network functions. It is a popular solution for managing the different microservices that make up a cloud-native application.

What is the use of Istio in Kubernetes?

Istio is designed for extensibility and can handle a diverse range of deployment needs. Istio's control plane runs on Kubernetes, and you can add applications deployed in that cluster to your mesh, extend the mesh to other clusters, or even connect VMs or other endpoints running outside of Kubernetes.

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 Eureka a service mesh?

Service Meshes and Istio A well-known example is Netflix that introduced several frameworks such as Eureka, Hystrix, Robbin to make the microservices-based applications more resilient, maintainable and robust.

Is Istio a load balancer?

By default, Istio uses a round-robin load balancing policy, where each service instance in the instance pool gets a request in turn. Istio also supports the following models, which you can specify in destination rules for requests to a particular service or service subset.

Is Istio an API gateway?

The Istio ingress is an API gateway implementation which accepts client calls and routes them to the application services inside the mesh.

What does Istio stand for?

Greek for “sail,” Istio (ιστίο) extends the greco-nautical theme that was established by Kubernetes (Greek for pilot, or helmsman, which is also the root of the term “cybernetics.”) Istio (sail) and its meshy cousin Istos (ιστός)– meaning mast, net, or web– both come from the ancient greek root Istimi (ἵστημι), which ...

How does Istio mesh work?

An Istio service mesh is logically split into a data plane and a control plane. The data plane is composed of a set of intelligent proxies (Envoy ) deployed as sidecars. These proxies mediate and control all network communication between microservices. They also collect and report telemetry on all mesh traffic.

Is Istio an ingress controller?

The Istio ingress gateway In Kubernetes Ingress, the ingress controller is responsible for watching Ingress resources and for configuring the ingress proxy. In Istio, the “controller” is basically the control plane, namely istiod .

Can you use Istio without Kubernetes?

In theory, yes. Istio components are designed to be 'platform independent'.

Should I use service mesh?

Why do I need a service mesh? If you are building applications on Kubernetes, then a service mesh like Linkerd provides critical observability, reliability, and security features with one big advantage: the application doesn't need to implement these features, or even to be aware that the service mesh is there!

Can you use Istio without Kubernetes?

In theory, yes. Istio components are designed to be 'platform independent'.

What is the difference between Istio and Kubernetes?

Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc. On the other hand, Kubernetes is detailed as "Manage a cluster of Linux containers as a single system to accelerate Dev and simplify Ops".

Can you use envoy without Istio?

Without the sidecar installed, services will talk directly to each other without going through Istio. Any Istio configuration, will not take effect, but communication between pods should still work.

What is Service Mesh?

A service mesh is a layer for a microservices application that you can configure. The mesh provides microservice discovery, load balancing, encryption, authentication, and authorization that are flexible, reliable, and fast.

How to implement a service mesh?

The typical way to implement a service mesh is by providing a proxy instance, called a sidecar, for each service instance. Sidecars handle inter‑service communications, monitoring, security‑related concerns – anything that can be abstracted away from the individual services. This way, developers can focus on development, support, and maintenance for the application code in the services; operations can maintain the service mesh and run the app.

What is microservice sprawl?

Microservice sprawl is a challenge that many companies run into using microservices. This rapid growth in microservices creates problems around standardizing routing between multiple services, versions, authorization, authentication, encryption, and load balancing managed by a Kubernetes cluster.

How to become proficient in Kubernetes?

To become more proficient with Kubernetes and related tools, you may wish to pursue Simplilearn’s courses in DevOps or the comprehensive DevOps Engineer Master’s Program . If you want to strengthen your cloud computing skills, consider Simplilearn’s courses in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud technology, or the Simplilearn Cloud Architect Master’s Program that covers all three cloud platforms.

Is a service mesh a solution?

A Service Mesh is not a solution that you can stand up and have run by itself. A service mesh must be tied into your DevOps strategy. For the next steps, you will want to put in place the following:

What is a Service Mesh?

Imagine you have an application running hundreds or thousands of microservices like Netflix already had in 2015.

What are the disadvantages of using a service mesh?

Probably the biggest disadvantage is that developers/operators need to learn yet another tool to run their application. Especially in the beginning, using a service mesh might add some problems due to more possibilities of misconfiguration and therefore breaking your application rather than helping.

What is Istio mesh?

Istio is the most popular service mesh solution and has an active community. As of this writing, the project has almost 28 thousand stars and more than 5 thousand forks on Github. Istio can be easily installed using Helm charts and also installs many useful tools to operate your Kubernetes cluster, like Prometheus, Jaeger, Grafana, and Zipkin.

What is Linkerd in Kubernetes?

Linkerd is another popular service mesh and has been completely re-written for version 2. Both versions combined have around 12 thousand stars on Github and also have a very active community. Linkerd provides a good-looking dashboard to help operators understand what is happening inside the Kubernetes cluster in real-time. Additionally, it installs useful tools like Prometheus and Grafana.

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 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 service mesh?

A service mesh provides the ability to make decisions control traffic and other such things as soon as it tries to go out of the node or as it enters the node. You don’t have to rely on something else in the middle to control that.

Does service-mesh works only on Kubernetes?

No. Well, I talked about containers so you must be confused that it works with Kubernetes. You can consider this container as a separate process running on each node that taps the traffic and does the processing as mentioned below. A service mesh provides the ability to make decisions control traffic and other such things as soon as it tries to go out of the node or as it enters the node. You don’t have to rely on something else in the middle to control that.

What is a service mesh?

A service mesh is not a “mesh of services.” It is a mesh of Layer 7 proxies that microservices can use to completely abstract the network away. Service meshes are designed to solve the many challenges developers face when talking to remote endpoints.

Why are service meshes not widely used?

This is undoubtedly due in part to their relative novelty and the fact that the general space is still evolving. However, service meshes are also not without criticisms.

Why use Istio or any service mesh for that matter?

If you are a developer or architect looking to create a network of deployed services with built-in traffic control features, service-to-service authentication and monitoring, all without having to make changes to your service code and you don’t mind running them on Kubernetes, then Istio is a good solution, even though it is not easy to install and requires a fair amount of knowledge of both, its own and Kubernetes’ internals to troubleshoot.

What is Istio mesh?

Istio is an open source service mesh designed to make it easier to connect, manage and secure traffic between, and obtain telemetry about microservices running in containers. Istio is a collaboration between IBM, Google and Lyft. It was originally announced in May 2017, with a 1.0 version released in July of 2018.

Should I use a service mesh?

As we point out in “ Should I Use a Service Mesh? ,” Istio is a powerful technology to establish and maintain reliable service-to-service connections, in particular for self-contained microservice architectures that are built on Kubernetes. As a result, it can and likely should be used with any such applications, irrespective of whether or not an enterprise-wide control plane such as Glasnostic exists. Because Istio addresses the local concerns around intra-application connectivity and Glasnostic the large-scale, complex behaviors of systems of applications, they are complementary and may be deployed independently of each other.

Does mixer help mask backend database failures?

Reliability: In some situations, Mixer could potentially help mask infrastructure backend database failures because of its caching capabilities.

Does Istio run on Kubernetes?

Because Istio currently runs only on Kubernetes, users will have to account for the well-known performance penalty that comes when running in a containerized environment. Finally, since most service meshes target individual microservice applications, not entire landscapes of connected applications, multi-cluster, multi-region support tends not to be a focus.

What is service mesh layer?

In general, service mesh layers on top of your Kubernetes infrastructure and is making communications between services over the network safe and reliable.

Why is service mesh important?

From an Operations point of view, Service Mesh is useful for any type of microservices architecture since it helps you control traffic, security, permissions, and observability.

What is Linkerd in Kubernetes?

Linkerd is arguably the second most popular service mesh on Kubernetes and, due to its rewrite in v2, its architecture mirrors Istio’s closely, with an initial focus on simplicity instead of flexibility.

How long does it take to deploy Kubernetes on AWS?

Once you have a Kubernetes infrastructure + Microservices architecture (Deploy a free Kubernetes cluster on AWS or on-premises in under five minutes : https://platform9.com/signup/), consider the below use cases in order to take advantage of Service Mesh in your organization today, regardless of the scale of your applications.

How does service mesh improve observability?

Improving observability into distributed services: with service-level visibility, tracing, and monitoring abilities. Some of the key capabilities of service mesh dramatically improve visibility as well as your ability to troubleshoot and mitigate incidents. For example, If one service in the architecture becomes a bottleneck, the common way to handle it is through re-tries, but that can worsen the bottleneck due to timeouts. With service mesh, you can easily break the circuit to failed services to disable non-functioning replicas and keep the API responsive.

Which service mesh has the most features?

Istio has the most features and flexibility of any of these three service meshes by far, but remember that flexibility means complexity, so your team needs to be ready for that.

Is service mesh intrusive?

Note that service mesh is not as an intrusive transformation as the one from monolithic applications to microservices, or from VMs to Kubernetes-based applications. Since most meshes use the sidecar model, most services don’t know that they run as a mesh.

What is OSM in Kubernetes?

OSM provides the following set of capabilities and features to provide a cloud native service mesh for your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters:

How does OSM work?

OSM runs an Envoy-based control plane on Kubernetes, can be configured with SMI APIs, and works by injecting an Envoy proxy as a sidecar container next to each instance of your application. The Envoy proxy contains and executes rules around access control policies, implements routing configuration, and captures metrics. The control plane continually configures proxies to ensure policies and routing rules are up to date and ensures proxies are healthy.

image

1.What is Kubernetes Service Mesh? | Avi Networks

Url:https://avinetworks.com/glossary/kubernetes-service-mesh/

5 hours ago Service mesh on Kubernetes achieves the same goal in a much more scalable manner. The service mesh in Kubernetes is typically implemented as a set of network proxies. Deployed alongside a “sidecar” of application code, these proxies serve as an introduction point for service mesh features and manage communication between the microservices.

2.What is a Service Mesh and How Does it Compare to …

Url:https://www.simplilearn.com/what-is-a-service-mesh-article

23 hours ago  · What is Service Mesh? A service mesh is a layer for a microservices application that you can configure. The mesh provides microservice discovery, load balancing, encryption, authentication, and authorization that are flexible, reliable, and fast. The typical way to implement a service mesh is by providing a proxy instance, called a sidecar, for each service instance.

3.About service meshes - Azure Kubernetes Service

Url:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/servicemesh-about

26 hours ago  · A Service mesh separates your business logic from managing the network traffic, security and monitoring. This should help to increase the productivity of the developers whereas network and operation specialists can configure the Kubernetes cluster. The separation is often achieved by using sidecars. This means that the service mesh injects an additional container …

4.Service Mesh in Kubernetes - Getting Started

Url:https://www.programmingwithwolfgang.com/service-mesh-kubernetes-getting-started/

32 hours ago  · A service mesh provides the ability to make decisions control traffic and other such things as soon as it tries to go out of the node or as it enters the node. You don’t have to rely on something else in the middle to control that. How traffic flows? Let me take you through a very basic service mesh that you can think of. Look at the diagram above.

5.What's a service mesh? - Red Hat

Url:https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/microservices/what-is-a-service-mesh

6 hours ago  · A service mesh takes away this whole complex part by using a proxy. Services can focus on running business logic and allow the service mesh to handle things like service discovery, routing, or tracing. How Service Meshes Work. Most service mesh implementations consist of two main components: the control plane and the data plane.

6.What is a service mesh? Is it born with Kubernetes?

Url:https://www.learnsteps.com/what-is-a-service-mesh-is-it-born-with-kubernetes/

1 hours ago  · Open Service Mesh (OSM) is a lightweight, extensible, cloud native service mesh that allows users to uniformly manage, secure, and get out-of-the-box observability features for highly dynamic microservice environments. OSM runs an Envoy-based control plane on Kubernetes and can be configured with SMI APIs. OSM works by injecting an Envoy proxy as a …

7.The Kubernetes Service Mesh: A Brief Introduction to Istio

Url:https://glasnostic.com/blog/kubernetes-service-mesh-what-is-istio/

14 hours ago

8.Kubernetes Service Mesh: A Comparison of Istio, Linkerd …

Url:https://platform9.com/blog/kubernetes-service-mesh-a-comparison-of-istio-linkerd-and-consul/

9 hours ago

9.Open Service Mesh - Azure Kubernetes Service

Url:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/open-service-mesh-about

36 hours ago

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9