Custom Features - Service Mesh 1.x | service mesh (2023)

FAQs

What are the features of a service mesh? ›

Common features provided by a service mesh include service discovery, load balancing, encryption and failure recovery. High availability is also common through the use of software controlled by APIs rather than through hardware. Service meshes can make service-to-service communication fast, reliable and secure.

Some of the drawbacks of service meshes are: The use of a service mesh can increase runtime instances. Communication involves an additional step—the service call first has to run through a sidecar proxy. Service meshes don't support integration with other systems or services.

tl;dr: A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for making service-to-service communication safe, fast, and reliable. If you're building a cloud native application, you need a service mesh.

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.

A service mesh consists of two elements: the data plane and the control plane. As the names suggest, the data plane handles the actual forwarding of traffic, whereas the control plane provides the configuration and coordination.

In conclusion, a Service Mesh is not a must for every Cloud-Native Kubernetes-based deployment. It does have a lot of benefits and features out of the box but comes with its own set of challenges that you have to take into consideration before using a Mesh.

A Service Mesh is a configurable infrastructure layer that makes communication between microservice applications possible, structured, and observable. A service Mesh also monitors and manages network traffic between microservices, redirecting and granting or limiting access as needed to optimize and protect the system.

Microservices have specific security needs, such as protection against third-party attacks, flexible access controls, mutual Transport Layer Security (TLS) and auditing tools. Service Mesh offers comprehensive security that gives operators the ability to address all of these issues.

What is the difference between API gateway and service mesh? ›

The API gateway is the component responsible for routing external communications. For example, the API gateway handles chatbot connections, purchase orders and visits to specific pages. Conversely, the service mesh is responsible for internal communications in the system.

Whereas upstream Istio takes a single tenant approach, Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh supports multiple independent control planes within the cluster. Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh uses a multitenant operator to manage the control plane lifecycle.

Service meshes generate a visible infrastructure layer that documents the health of different parts of apps as they interact, making it easier to optimize communication and avoid downtime as your app grows.

Load balancing.

A service mesh implements more sophisticated Layer 7 (application layer) load balancing, with richer algorithms and more powerful traffic management. Load‑balancing parameters can be modified via API, making it possible to orchestrate blue‑green or canary deployments.

Data Mesh is founded in four principles: "domain-driven ownership of data", "data as a product", "self-serve data platform" and a "federated computational governance".

If the accuracy is of the highest concern then hexahedral mesh is the most preferable one.

A 3D mesh model is a collection of vertices, edges, and faces that together form a three-dimensional object. The vertices are the coordinates in three-dimensional space, the edges each connect two adjacent vertices, and the faces (also called polygons ) enclose the edges to form the surface of the object.

What are the levels of mesh? ›

If you are looking to increase your WiFi speeds overall, a mesh system, or WiFi booster like a range extender, will not improve your Internet speed. They increase coverage.

A Kubernetes service mesh is a tool that inserts security, observability, and reliability features to applications at the platform layer instead of the application layer.

The biggest downside to a mesh WiFi router system is that you need to keep routers plugged into outlets in multiple rooms of your home. If you live in an apartment, or older house with fewer outlets, this may be hard to justify. It can also be a little off putting to have WiFi routers strewn throughout your house.

A service mesh is a mechanism for managing communications between the various individual services that make up modern applications in a microservice-based system.

A service mesh handles internal traffic between services inside a cluster, and the proxy is deployed alongside the application. In contrast, an API gateway handles external traffic coming to a cluster — often referred to as north/south communication.

Kubernetes is essentially about application lifecycle management through declarative configuration, while a service mesh is essentially about providing inter-application traffic, security management and observability.

Going for a complete mesh system may be overkill unless you consistently have multiple users and connected devices competing for bandwidth. A Wi-Fi extender can be a worthwhile investment instead if you decide to stay with a traditional home router but need to expand coverage.

In some situations, mesh Wi-Fi can allow for faster speeds, better reliability and greater wireless coverage of your home than a conventional router would. As systems, they're also very scalable and quick to customize.

Mesh routers are worth the price if you have connectivity issues in multiple parts of your home and want an easy way to get a stable, fast, expandable network. However, if just a single room has WiFi issues, it might be more cost-effective to go with an extender paired with a traditional router.

Is service mesh a load balancer? ›

In Mesh, a load balancer is the same as a reverse proxy and is configured to have multiple endpoints for a server. It distributes load of incoming client requests based various scheduling algorithms, for example, round robin, weighted least request, random, ring-hash etc.

Dedicated infrastructure layer: A service mesh is not designed to solve business issues, but is a dedicated infrastructure layer (middleware).

When your application size does not justify the need to split it into many smaller components, using a microservices framework may not be ideal. There's no need to further break down applications that are already small enough as-is.

A service mesh helps organizations run microservices at scale by providing: A more flexible release process (for example, support for canary deployments, A/B testing, and blue/green deployments) Availability and resilience (for example, setup retries, failovers, circuit breakers, and fault injection)

One of the most important examples of popular service meshes is Istio, CNCF project, and Linkerd. And keep in mind that you need API gateways to use Service mesh because API Gateways overlap with service mesh for functionality.

Service Mesh Platforms Overview

Service meshes are an infrastructure layer within an application or system that uses the Kubernetes container management platform. They allow microservices to communicate with each other within the application itself.

Linkerd is said to be the lightest and fastest service mesh as of now. It makes running Cloud-Native services easier, more reliable, safer, and more visible by providing observability for all Microservices running in the cluster. All of this without requiring any Microservices source code changes.

SideCars reduce the code complexity by segregating APIs with business logic from code with infrastructure concerns. Service Mesh helps in secure communication by enforcing network policies on the sidecar layer, thus isolating the application layer from rogue traffic.

The service mesh pattern is only relevant to systems made up of multiple services that communicate over a network. You must have access to all machines or containers that host the services making up the system so that you can deploy the network proxy on them.

What is Istio used for? ›

Istio is an open source service mesh platform that provides a way to control how microservices share data with one another. It includes APIs that let Istio integrate into any logging platform, telemetry, or policy system.

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.

Service mesh architecture

It is called a sidecar because a proxy is attached to each application, much like a sidecar attached to a motorbike. In Kubernetes, the application container sits alongside the proxy sidecar container in the same pod.

Istio is an open source service mesh that helps organizations run distributed, microservices-based apps anywhere. Why use Istio? Istio enables organizations to secure, connect, and monitor microservices, so they can modernize their enterprise apps more swiftly and securely.

Ingress is a Kubernetes API object that manages external access to multiple resources running in a cluster. Most often, these resources are Kubernetes Services. Underneath, Ingress is a kind of proxy, typically for HTTP or HTTPS traffic, so it works at L7, similar to a service mesh.

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.

The Istio control plane, istiod, is vulnerable to a request processing error, allowing a malicious attacker that sends a specially crafted or oversized message, to crash the control plane process. This can be exploited when the Kubernetes validating or mutating webhook service is exposed publicly.

Istio has two components: the data plane and the control plane. The data plane is the communication between services.

What is Istio in layman terms? ›

Istio is an independent, open source service mesh technology that enables developers to connect, secure, control, observe and run a distributed microservice architecture (MSA), regardless of platform, source or vendor. Istio manages service interactions across both container and virtual machine (VM) based workloads.

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".

To implement a service mesh, you need to deploy the control plane components to a machine in the cluster, inject the data plane proxy alongside each service replica and configure their behavior using policies. In a multi-cluster or multi-zone deployment, a global control plane is used to coordinate across clusters.

Service mesh comes with its own terminology for component services and functions: Container orchestration framework. As more and more containers are added to an application's infrastructure, a separate tool for monitoring and managing the set of containers – a container orchestration framework – becomes essential.

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.