Whenever you hear people speak about containers and container networking, there is a high chance of the Service Mesh coming up as a topic. It is a real hype and while being on the twitters i discovered this great article by William Morgan of @BuoyantIO, the creator of Linkerd.
William does a great job of explaining the technology, the use cases, what to use it for and what not and i have a couple of comments to add:
- demistifying the Service Mesh is great, sometimes people think it is a superb piece of technology when it just is something we used to have for 20 years with some additional glue to make it more useful
- the complexity of the service mesh is hard to handle without automation. If you are not fully automated in your CI/CD workflows, it will likely not something you can easily make use of
- it makes a lot of sense to take away complexity from development and devops teams and give their applications additional capabilities (canary deployments, a/b testing, etc)
- it will change the way you think about reliability and give you capabilities that you probably never before had
- it introduces a new way to handle security and access by adding mutual TLS
- i fully agree with Williams conclusions, it makes sense if you run a platform based on Kubernetes. All other use cases this is still interesting, but you don’t have to look at it
