The Enterprise Path to Service Mesh Architectures

Chapter 1. Service Mesh Fundamentals

Why is operating microservices difficult? What is a service mesh, and why do I need one?

Many emergent technologies build on or reincarnate prior thinking and approaches to computing and networking paradigms. Why is this phenomenon necessary? In the case of service meshes, we’ll blame the microservices and containers movement—the cloud-native approach to designing scalable, independently delivered services. Microservices have exploded what were once internal application communications into a mesh of service-to-service remote procedure calls (RPCs) transported over networks. Bearing many benefits, microservices provide democratization of language and technology choice across independent service teams—teams that create new features quickly as they iteratively and continuously deliver software (typically as a service).

Operating Many Services

And, sure, the first few microservices are relatively easy to deliver and operate—at least compared to what difficulties organizations face the day they arrive at many microservices. Whether that “many” is 10 or 100, the onset of a major headache is inevitable. Different medicines are dispensed to alleviate microservices headaches; use of client libraries is one notable example. Language and framework-specific client libraries, whether preexisting or created, are used to address distributed systems challenges in microservices environments. It’s in these environments that many teams first consider their path ...