As the service mesh concept continues to evolve, a Service Mesh Interface (SMI) specification is emerging, which provides interoperability between different service meshes. Kubernetes has already made network and storage extensible through the Container Network Interface (CNI) and Container Storage Interface (CSI) specifications. In the same spirit, the SMI specification, though new, has started to gain traction from different service mesh providers.

This chapter will introduce you to the evolving SMI specification and the SPIFFE specification, which provide secure naming conventions for the services running in a Kubernetes environment.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• SMI
• SPIFFE