The Enterprise Path to Service Mesh Architectures

Chapter 5. Conclusion

First container runtimes had their go, then container orchestrators had theirs. The next layer of infrastructure (Layer 5) will have its time. Whether you think of them as the Proxy Wars or not, 2018 is the year of the service mesh. There’s much promise in the value service meshes will provide.

Although orchestrators don’t bring all that you need, unfortunately, neither do service meshes. They do get you closer, however. Service meshes are missing or have nascent support for the following:

• Distributed debugging

• Provide nascent topology and dependency graphs, although projects like Kiali are out to improve this area.

• Participate in application life cycle management, but would benefit from shifting left to incorporate:

  • Deeper automated canary support with integration into Continuous Integration systems, which would improve the pipeline of many software projects

  • Automatic API documentation, perhaps, integrating with toolkits like swagger or readme.io

  • API function/interface discovery

• White-box monitoring to move beyond distributed tracing and into application performance monitoring.

• Multitenancy (multiple control planes running on the same platform).

• Multicluster such that each certificate authority shares the same root certificate and workloads can authenticate each other across clusters within the same mesh.

• Improve on the integration of load testing tools like slow_cooker, fortio, lago or others to identify ideal mesh resiliency configurations by facilitating ...