The Enterprise Path to Service Mesh Architectures

Chapter 4. Customization and Integration

How do I fit a service mesh into my existing infrastructure, operational practices and observability tooling?

Some service meshes such as Conduit (soon to be Linkerd) are not designed to be customized; rather, they aim to focus on out-of-the-box functionality and ease of deployment. Istio is an example of a service mesh designed with customizability in mind. Its extensibility comes in two primary forms: swappable sidecar proxies and telemetry/authorization adapters. Consul’s Connect is intended to be displaced as needed, as well.

Customizable Sidecars

Within Istio, though Envoy is the default service proxy sidecar, you can choose another service proxy for your sidecar. Although there are multiple service proxies in the ecosystem, outside of Envoy, only two have currently demonstrated integration with Istio: Linkerd and NGINX. Conduit is not currently designed as a general-purpose proxy; instead, it is focused on being lightweight, placing extensibility as a secondary concern by offering extension via gRPC plug-in. Consul uses Connect as the default proxy embedded into the same binary. Operating at Layer 4, Connect isn’t meant to compete on features or performance with dedicated proxy solutions, but enables third-party proxies to integrate to provide the data plane with Consul operating as the control plane. As a control plane, Consul integrates with many data-plane solutions including Envoy, HAProxy, NGINX, and exposes an API for integration ...