Preface
As someone interested in modern software design, you have heard of service mesh architectures primarily in the context of microservices. Service meshes are being layered into modern infrastructures ubiquitously, offering the ability to create and run robust and resilient applications while exercising granular control over them. Is a service mesh right for you? This report will help answer common questions on service mesh architectures through the lens of a large enterprise. It also addresses how to evaluate your organization’s readiness for a service mesh, provides factors to consider when building new applications and converting existing applications to best take advantage of a service mesh, and offers insight on deployment architectures used to get you there.
What You Will Learn
In this report, we’ll discuss answers to the following questions:
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What is a service mesh, and why do I need one?
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What are the different service meshes, and how do they contrast?
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Where do services meshes layer in with other technologies?
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When should I adopt a service mesh?
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What are popular deployment models and why?
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What are practical steps for adopting a service mesh in my enterprise?
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How do I fit a service mesh into my existing infrastructure?
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Who This Report Is For
The intended readers are developers, operators, architects, and infrastructure (IT) leaders who are faced with operational challenges of distributed systems. Technologists need to understand the various capabilities of and paths to service meshes so that they can make an informed decision about selecting and investing in an architecture and deployment model. This will allow them to provide visibility, resiliency, traffic, and security control of their distributed application services.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Matt Turner, Ronald Petty, Karthik Gaekwad, Alex Blewitt, Dr. Girish Ranganathan (Dr. G), and the occasional two t’s Matt Baldwin for their many efforts to ensure the technical correctness of this report.