Alexis Kestler
Microservices and containers changed application architecture, but they introduced new challenges for developers. When you break down a monolith into dozens or hundreds of independent services, how do you efficiently connect them together? How do you track failures or performance issues when the pieces are so distributed? As your system grows, it can start to feel like a giant game of telephone talking across different platforms and languages!
This is where a service mesh comes into play – acting like a digital switched telephone network for your microservices. But installing a service mesh is one thing – effectively operating, optimizing and troubleshooting it requires a service mesh manager. Let‘s explore what these managers offer and how to choose the best one for your needs.
Why Microservices Communication Gets Messy
In the monolithic application days, your app was a single process. Communication between components relied on method calls within the same runtime environment. But microservices are meant to be decoupled, portable chunks of business logic. Each one scales and is deployed independently.
This flexibility is powerful, but also creates new headaches:
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How do services find each other? In a monolith, your components just imported packages. Now you need a service discovery system.
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How to handle failure? If one service call fails, you would wrap it in a try-catch block. With separate microservices, retries and circuit breakers are required.
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Where are the logs? Logs are now spread across hosts running different services.
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How to track performance? Following a request as it fans out across services is tricky.
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What about security? You need to authenticate requests and encrypt traffic between services.
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How to test changes? Canary deployments allow testing production config changes.
While possible to build all this resiliency and observability into each service, it‘s a ton of duplicated work! Plus, modifying the logic requires changing code in multiple places.
A service mesh tackles these cross-cutting concerns with infrastructure outside your services:
It‘s a dedicated layer for handling service communication, security, monitoring and other functions in a centralized, consistent way. But that‘s just the data plane of proxies. Managing them requires another component – the service mesh control plane.
Key Capabilities of Service Mesh Control Planes
Service mesh control planes typically provide:
Traffic Management
Control which requests go where with features like:
- Load balancing algorithms
- Retries and timeouts
- Traffic shifting for testing/canary releases
- Traffic splitting between versions
- Fault injection to test resiliency
This allows optimizing traffic for performance, security or your own routing rules.
Observability
Understand what‘s happening inside your mesh with:
- Metrics, logging and tracing for all traffic
- Pre-built dashboards and visualization
- Alerting based on metrics thresholds
Observability is key to operating and debugging a complex microservices system.
Security
Lock down service-to-service communication with:
- mTLS authentication between services
- Authorization policies
- Role-based access control (RBAC)
Zero trust security is crucial for microservices.
Multi-Cluster Management
Manage multiple environments through:
- Mesh configuration synchronization
- Cross-cluster traffic management
- Federation of monitoring data
Supporting hybrid and multi-cloud deployments is important for many organizations.
These capabilities allow centrally configuring proxies deployed next to each service instance to handle cross-cutting needs. But to use them effectively, you need the right management plane driving the data plane.
Key Differences Between Service Mesh Solutions
While all service mesh managers aim to solve these issues, there are some key differences between solutions:
Open source vs. commercial
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Open source options like Istio and Linkerd are freely available. You can use community versions at no cost and pay for enterprise tiers and support.
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Commercial offerings like Consul Service Mesh include commercial licensing on all features. AWS App Mesh charges based on usage.
General purpose vs. specialized
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General purpose platforms like Istio provide a wide range of traffic management, security and observability features.
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Specialized meshes like Linkerd focus on a particular goal like performance or multi-cluster management.
Standalone vs. integrated
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Standalone service meshes like Istio can be installed independently.
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Integrated options like Consul combine service mesh capabilities with existing tools for service discovery or ingress management.
There are great options across the spectrum – open source and commercial, specialized and general purpose. The right choice depends on your team‘s needs and environment.
How to Select the Right Service Mesh
With so many options, choosing a service mesh manager involves weighing several factors:
Ease of Use
How intuitive is the platform to operate? Does it use declarative configuration? How steep is the learning curve? Pick a mesh that fits your team‘s technical skills.
Features
Are capabilities like traffic management and security policy important? Or is basic connectivity and monitoring sufficient? Prioritize must-have functionality.
Performance Overhead
What resource usage and latency does the proxy add? A lightweight proxy like Envoy has lower overhead. Heavier proxies affect app performance.
Scalability
Will the mesh handle large clusters with hundreds of services? Review published scale tests. Lighter platforms typically scale better.
Community & Support
Is the project active with frequent releases? Are documentation and tutorials available? Is commercial support offered? Community activity is essential.
Cost
What is the licensing model? Open source software has free options. Managed services charge based on usage. Commercial products have paid tiers.
Weigh these criteria against your use cases to narrow down options. You may also consider vendor neutrality – using open standards allows avoiding vendor lock-in if requirements evolve.
A Breakdown of Leading Service Mesh Solutions
Now that we‘ve explored selection criteria, let‘s look at specific platforms and where they excel:
Istio
Overview – Originally developed by Google and IBM, Istio is the most widely adopted open source service mesh. It includes rich traffic management, security and observability.
Architecture
Istio‘s control plane configures and manages Envoy proxies running next to each service. It provides monitoring dashboards, tracing and more.
Features
- Fine-grained traffic routing and shifting
- Automated canary rollouts
- Authentication, authorization and quotas
- Distributed tracing support
- Custom metrics and logs
Benefits
- Full set of service mesh features
- Broad platform support including VMs
- Large ecosystem of tools and extensions
Use Cases
With extensive capabilities beyond basic connectivity and monitoring, Istio is great for complex applications needing features like canary rollouts, traffic shifting or fine-grained observability.
Linkerd
Overview – Developed by Buoyant, Linkerd is a popular lightweight service mesh focused on performance and simplicity.
Architecture
Linkerd‘s data plane uses ultralight proxies written in Rust. The control plane manages configuration and monitoring integration.
Features
- Automatic load balancing
- Failure recovery and retries
- Service discovery
- Distributed tracing
Benefits
- Minimizes resource overhead
- Simpler operation and troubleshooting
- High performance and scalability
Use Cases
Linkerd is great for applications where performance is critical. It provides basic service mesh capabilities with low overhead.
Consul Service Mesh
Overview – HashiCorp Consul‘s service mesh capabilities integrate with its service discovery and segmentation.
Architecture
Consul proxies connect to the Consul control plane. You can use built-in or external Envoy proxies.
Features
- Service discovery
- Segmentation and encryption
- Health checking
- Multi-datacenter support
Benefits
- Unified networking, security and observability
- Lightweight and scalable
- Leverage existing Consul adoption
Use Cases
For organizations using Consul, its service mesh features are a natural fit. The integration reduces tool sprawl.
AWS App Mesh
Overview – A fully managed service mesh for EKS and AWS Fargate workloads.
Architecture
The control plane simplifies running Envoy with AWS integrations like CloudWatch and load balancers.
Features
- Simplified Envoy management
- CloudWatch metrics and traces
- IAM-based access control
- Integration with other AWS services
Benefits
- Tight integration with AWS ecosystem
- Fully-managed control plane
- Usage-based pricing model
Use Cases
AWS App Mesh streamlines running Envoy-based service mesh on AWS. Especially useful for teams leveraging other AWS services.
Kuma
Overview – Developed by Kong, Kuma‘s control plane supports Envoy sidecars and Kubernetes Envoy proxies.
Architecture
Kuma uses a universal data plane API to support different proxy implementations across environments.
Features
- Multi-cluster management
- Declarative configuration
- Policies as code
- Support for VMs and Kubernetes
Benefits
- Flexible architecture
- Advanced multi-cluster capabilities
- Detailed observability
Use Cases
Kuma‘s strength in managing service mesh across clusters makes it a great choice for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
NGINX Service Mesh
Overview – Combines NGINX‘s performant proxy with service mesh capabilities.
Architecture
Uses NGINX for the data plane combined with a management server and monitoring integrations.
Features
- Rate limiting
- Circuit breaking
- Blue/green and canary deployments
- Distributed tracing
Benefits
- High performance data plane
- Easy to get started
- Integrates with other NGINX products
Use Cases
Teams already using NGINX who want a simplified on-ramp to service mesh will find the NGINX Service Mesh easy to adopt.
Gloo Mesh
Overview – An enterprise service mesh that extends open source Istio with advanced features.
Architecture
Gloo Mesh adds multi-tenancy, security and manageability features to Istio components.
Features
- Multi-cluster management
- Fine-grained role-based access control
- GitOps workflows
- Backwards compatibility with Istio
Benefits
- Enhanced security and access controls
- Full-featured multi-cluster management
- Improved usability
Use Cases
Gloo Mesh augments Istio for organizations needing features like strict RBAC across environments.
Meshery
Overview – An open source management plane that supports Istio, Linkerd, Consul and more.
Architecture
Meshery uses adapters to connect to different service mesh data planes, providing a unified management experience.
Features
- Management of multiple meshes
- Performance benchmarking
- Lifecycle automation
- Architecture analysis
Benefits
- Evaluate different service mesh technologies
- Unified management
- Identify ideal infrastructure
Use Cases
Meshery simplifies service mesh evaluation and comparison. Great for prototyping different options with the same workload.
Key Recommendations for Selecting a Service Mesh
The service mesh landscape continues to evolve quickly. Here are some key recommendations as you evaluate options:
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Start simple – Many teams only need basic traffic management and monitoring. Don‘t overcomplicate with complex features.
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Focus on usability – Ease of use impacts ongoing overhead. Prioritize meshes providing a great operator experience.
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Consider existing tools – Leverage familiarity with solutions like Consul or NGINX where possible.
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Evaluate open source options – Istio, Linkerd and others deliver enterprise-grade capabilities for free.
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Standardize on Envoy – Its widespread use as a data plane proxy limits vendor lock-in.
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Investigate managed services – AWS App Mesh and similar solutions reduce operational burden.
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Think beyond your cluster – Support for VMs, multi-cluster, etc. provides flexibility.
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Monitor community traction – Mature tools like Istio and Linkerd have momentum. But keep an eye on newer solutions too.
Hopefully this overview gives you a starting point for evaluating service mesh managers. Reach out if you need help assessing options for your specific architecture and use cases!
