Top 3 Service Mesh Technologies for Microservices and Kubernetes

Service mesh is the next best move that enterprises can take to overcome security and networking challenges obstructing Kubernetes deployment and container adoption. Check out some popular tools for deploying service mesh here in this blog!

What Is a Service Mesh?

Before we read about these tools, let's know what Service mesh is in Kubernetes. A service mesh is a technology pattern that can be applied to microservices-based applications for managing networked communication between services. It ensures that the communication between the services within the containerized infrastructure is fast, reliable, and secure.  

In the 2020 Cloud-Native Survey, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found that the use of service mesh in production has jumped by 50%  from last year.

Here are some popular service mesh tools for managing service-to-service connections and providing developers with valuable observability, traffic control, and security benefits. Let’s take a look!

Istio

ISTIO Service Mesh is a configurable, open-source service-mesh layer that acts as a reliable solution to monitor and control how microservices share data with one another. ISTIO provides a clear and language-independent way to flexibly and easily automate the network functions within an application.

ISTIO allows IT teams to add capabilities of observability, traffic management, and security to the applications without actually writing codes for adding these functionalities to the app. With service mesh, developers do not need to write codes for networking and security from scratch.

Moreover, this popular service meshing technology enables DevOps & SRE teams to secure, connect, and monitor microservices to modernize their enterprise applications faster and securely. You’ve already read about what Service mesh is in Kubernetes. So, now let’s explore the ISTIO architecture.

Here’s a brief description of the ISTIO architecture. The Istio architecture comprises two main components,

• The Control Plane: Is used to configure and manage proxies in the data plane. 
• The Data Plane: The second main component of the ISTIO service mesh is the Data plane, composed of a set of intelligent proxies known as Envoy. These proxies are deployed as sidecars. They control all network communication between microservices.

Linkerd

Next on the list of popular service mesh tools is Linkerd. Linkerd is an open-source, security-first service mesh for Kubernetes. Linkerd adds critical security, observability, and reliability features to the Kubernetes stack with no code change required. This transparent service meshing technology makes modern applications safe and secure with its unique features, including service discovery, load balancing, failure handling, instrumentation, and routing to all inter-service communication.

Linkerd acts as a transparent HTTP/gRPC/thrift/etc. proxy and can usually be plunged into existing applications with minimum configuration, regardless of what language they’re written in. It works with several common protocols and service discovery backends, including scheduled environments such as Mesos and Kubernetes.

Consul

Consul is a multi-cloud service networking platform to connect and secure services across any runtime platform and public or private cloud. It is a service mesh solution that provides a full-featured control plane with functionalities like service discovery, configuration, and segmentation. Each of these features can be used individually as needed, or they can be used together to build a complete service mesh. 

Consul can be used to exhibit services and nodes on a flexible interface that allows users to have an updated view of the complete infrastructure they are a part of. It demands a data plane and supports a proxy and native integration model. It operates through a simple built-in proxy and supports 3rd party proxy integrations such as Envoy. It runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows and includes an optional browser-based UI. 

The Real Crux!

A service mesh is responsible for constantly keeping up with significant security concerns within the cloud environment. This is why deploying a service mesh has become a major priority for enterprises. But, as an app grows and scales, the complexity of monitoring microservices increases. It would help if you had the right tools, a proficient team, and a robust Microservices management platform to tranquilize the intricacies of deploying a service mesh.