Service Mesh Platforms
Best Service Mesh Platforms include:
AWS App Mesh, HashiCorp Consul, Kong Konnect, Istio, Traefik, Avi Vantage, from VMware, Google Cloud Anthos Service Mesh, Envoy Proxy, Apache ZooKeeper and Aspen Mesh.
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OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
The IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides the Managed Istio installation add on, designed to provide additonal control over clusters and the microservices they comprise via automatic updates and lifecycle management of control plane components, and integration with platform logging…
HashiCorp Consul is a tool for discovering and configuring services in the IT infrastructure. It provides service discovery, health checking, key/value stores and support for multiple data centers out of the box.
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AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. App Mesh aims to give end-to-end visibility and high-availability for applications. There is no additional…
Kong Inc. is a cloud connectivity company headquartered in San Francisco. They are the creator and primary supporter of Kong, the open-source Microservice API gateway, and offer Kong Konnect, an enterprise-tier platform that delivers connectivity and visibility for services in multi-…
Tetrate offers a managed Istio Subscription, which they provide as a lifecycle management CLI tool that ensures the use of trusted versions of Istio.
Tetrate Cloud is a fully managed Istio based service mesh platform. The vendor states it can be used to gain:Secure any application - Get a unified and consistent way to secure and manage workloads across heterogeneous deployment environments with end-to-end mTLS.Seamless connectivity-…
Buoyant Cloud is the eponymous enterprise solution for running Linkerd at scale, from the company in San Francisco, enabling the user to manage a service mesh deployment through a single pane of glass. Track data plane and control plane health, manage mesh lifecycles and versions,…
Linkerd is presented as an ultra light, ultra simple, and ultra powerful service mesh. Developed by Buoyant and now available CNCF-hosted and open source, the developers say that Linkerd adds security, observability, and reliability to Kubernetes, without the complexity.
Grey Matter is a service mesh platform from Decipher Technology Studios in Alexandria, that aims to secure and simplify enterprise multi-cloud and hybrid cloud operations. Grey Matter enables flexible service-to-service intercommunications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.…
NGINX Service Mesh is a data plane that provides load balancing, reverse proxy, traffic routing, identity, and encryption features needed for production-grade service mesh deployments.
A Service Mesh and API Platform for Kubernetes, Zero-Trust and Microservices. Solo.io's Gloo Platform includes Gloo Edge, an API gateway for application traffic, and Gloo Mesh, a service mesh control plane. The Gloo Platform integrates API Gateway, Kubernetes Ingress, Service Mesh,…
Created by Istio founders, Tetrate Service Bridge is an edge-to-workload application connectivity platform that aims to provide enterprises with a consistent, unified way to connect and secure services across an entire mesh-managed environment.
Software AG's webMethods suite of API products include the webMethods API IPaaS product, along with the Developer Portal for a consumer-centric UI for APIs, the API Gateway runway security and data protection tool, the Microgateway microservice gateway tool, and the AppMesh service…
Aspen Mesh, in Boulder, aims to simplify the service mesh. They boast a tested, hardened and supported distribution of Istio that makes it easy for enterprises to get the power of Istio without the headaches.
Anthos Service Mesh is a fully managed service mesh for complex microservices architectures, available on Google Cloud.
Traefik Labs in San Francisco develops cloud-native application networking software that helps developers and operations teams build, deploy and run modern microservices. Traefik Labs’ flagship solution, Traefik Enterprise, provides API management, ingress control and service mesh…
Apache ZooKeeper is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source server which enables highly reliable distributed coordination. ZooKeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services.…
Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy designed for cloud-native applications. Envoy was initially developed and deployed on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and works on Linux including Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and works on Windows as a target platform.
Avi Networks, from VMware (acquired June, 2019) enables public-cloud simplicity for application services such as load balancing, application analytics, and security in data centers or cloud. The Avi Networks Platform provides software-based ADC capabilities, auto scaling and automation…
Istio is an open source service mesh that layers transparently onto existing distributed applications. Istio’s features provide a uniform way to secure, connect, and monitor services. Istio is the path to load balancing, service-to-service authentication, and monitoring.
Learn More About Service Mesh Platforms
What are Service Mesh Platforms?
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. Service meshes have emerged in response to a particular pain point for Kubernetes. Specifically, Kubernetes originally requires microservices to communicate outside of the application itself to interact with each other. Service Meshes provide the connective communications tissue between microservices to keep these communications and data internal.
The service mesh infrastructure layer resides as “sidecars” next to each microservice. This configuration leads each microservice to communicate with the service mesh, which then handles the communications direction and load balancing between microservices. This abstracts the communications process out of the microservices code itself. Service meshes can be built into applications during development, or layered on top of existing Kubernetes-based systems.
Service meshes were initially created as open source platforms to resolve a functional pain point for developers. These open source options are still quite popular. However, technology providers have recently begun building their own proprietary service meshes. Others are building on top of open source technology to offer more prebuilt features and capabilities.
The primary benefits of service meshes are efficiency and security. Applications can run more efficiently by keeping communications within the application itself. They also centralize the related communications management functions, such as load balancing and observability, within the native infrastructure, rather than layering additional systems and agents. Service meshes also allow developers to build more quickly. The infrastructure frees developers from worrying about inter-microservice concerns when building new features and capabilities into applications, such as importing/exporting environment variables. Service meshes also provide more security, since communications and data stay within the application. This effectively reduces the applications’ attack surface.
Service Mesh Platforms Comparison
Service meshes are still an emerging category. However, there are some factors to consider when comparing options:
- Open Source, Free, or Paid Offerings: The 3 licensing models will each come with tradeoffs for buyers. Open source service meshes will give developers the most flexibility, but will lack the support and prebuilt offerings of other options. Leveraging vendors’ free service meshes can come with more prebuilt capabilities, but less configuration. Paid offerings come with a price tag, but will also offer more support and implementation services.
- Vendor-Specific vs. Vendor-Agnostic: Can each service mesh interface with environments regardless of vendor? Or does it only integrate well with products from the same vendor? Consider the vendors in the business’s existing tech stack, and whether the primary provider also offers a service mesh. The native integration can be highly beneficial in some cases.
- Standalone Product vs. Suite Offering: Is each service mesh purchasable on its own, or is it part of a larger container management solution? Vendors will vary in how they offer these products. Vendors with more of an API background are more likely to offer the solution standalone, while container managers are likely to offer a service mesh as an enhancement for its other offerings.
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Pricing Information
Service meshes are often free to use. However, in many cases they will need other technologies from the vendor to work effectively and efficiently within the container environments. For free or open source options, there are often paid support and implementation offerings that may be worthwhile for many organizations. Enterprise-scale SM are more likely to be paid, with tailored pricing available by quote from the vendor.