Modern cloud-native applications often focus on architectural styles such as microservices, function as a service, eventing, and reactivity. Cloud-native applications typically run within virtualized environments — whether this involves sandboxed process isolation, container-based solutions, or hardware VMs — and applications and services are dynamically orchestrated. Although this shift to building cloud-native systems provides many benefits, it also introduces several new challenges, particularly around the deployment of applications and runtime configuration of networking.

Some of these technological challenges have been solved with the emergence of de facto solutions: for example, Docker for container packaging and Kubernetes for deployment and runtime orchestration. However, one of the biggest challenges, implementing and managing dynamic and secure networking, did not initially get as much traction as other problem spaces. Innovators like Calico, Weave, and CoreOS provided early container networking solutions, but it arguably took the release of Buoyant’s Linkerd, Lyft’s Envoy proxy, and Google’s Istio to really drive engineering interest in this space.

The service mesh space is a rapidly emerging technical and commercial opportunity, and although we expect some aggregation or attrition of offerings over the coming months and years, for the moment, there are plenty of options to choose from (many of which we have covered on InfoQ):

- Istio and Envoy, which are covered in this emag;

- Linkerd (and Linkerd 2, which includes Conduit) are also covered here;

- Cilium, API-aware networking and security powered by the eBPF kernel features;

- HashiCorp Consul Connect, a distributed service mesh to connect, secure, and configure services across any runtime platform; and

- NGINX (with Istio and nginMesh) or NGINX Plus with Controller.

We hope this InfoQ emag will help you decide if your organisation would benefit from using a service mesh, and if so, that it also guides you on your service mesh journey. We are always keen to publish practitioner experience and learning, and so please do get in touch if you have a service mesh story to share.

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