Service Mesh - Kubernetes

Service Mesh

A service mesh is an architectural pattern for microservices deployments. It’s primary goal is to make service-to-service communications secure, fast, and reliable.

In a service mesh architecture, microservices within a given deployment or cluster interact with each other through sidecar proxy’s. The security and communication rules behind these interactions are directed through a control plane. The developer can configure and add policies at the control plane level, and abstract the governance considerations behind microservices, regardless of the technology used to build. Popular Service Mesh frameworks, such as Istio, have emerged to help organizations implement these architectural patterns. 

A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that controls service-to-service communication within a distributed application. This method enables separate parts of an application to communicate with each other. Service meshes appear commonly in concert with cloud-native applications, containers and microservices.

The Top 10 Service Mesh Tools Include:

1. Anthos Service Mesh by Google
2. AWS App Mesh
3. HashiCorp Consul Service Mesh
4. Envoy
5. Gloo Mesh
6. Istio
7. Kong Mesh
8. Linkerd
9. NGINX Service Mesh
10. Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh.

Benefits of a service mesh?

A service mesh provides a centralized, dedicated infrastructure layer that handles the intricacies of service-to-service communication within a distributed application. Next, we give several service mesh benefits.

Service discovery

Service meshes provide automated service discovery, which reduces the operational load of managing service endpoints. They use a service registry to dynamically discover and keep track of all services within the mesh. Services can find and communicate with each other seamlessly, regardless of their location or underlying infrastructure. You can quickly scale by deploying new services as required.

Load balancing

Service meshes use various algorithms—such as round-robin, least connections, or weighted load balancing—to distribute requests across multiple service instances intelligently. Load balancing improves resource utilization and ensures high availability and scalability. You can optimize performance and prevent network communication bottlenecks.

Traffic management

Service meshes offer advanced traffic management features, which provide fine-grained control over request routing and traffic behavior. Here are a few examples.

Traffic splitting

You can divide incoming traffic between different service versions or configurations. The mesh directs some traffic to the updated version, which allows for a controlled and gradual rollout of changes. This provides a smooth transition and minimizes the impact of changes.

Request mirroring

You can duplicate traffic to a test or monitoring service for analysis without impacting the primary request flow. When you mirror requests, you gain insights into how the service handles particular requests without affecting the production traffic.

Canary deployments

You can direct a small subset of users or traffic to a new service version, while most users continue to use the existing stable version. With limited exposure, you can experiment with the new version's behavior and performance in a real-world environment.

Security

Service meshes provide secure communication features such as mutual TLS (mTLS) encryption, authentication, and authorization. Mutual TLS enables identity verification in service-to-service communication. It helps ensure data confidentiality and integrity by encrypting traffic. You can also enforce authorization policies to control which services access specific endpoints or perform specific actions.

Monitoring

Service meshes offer comprehensive monitoring and observability features to gain insights into your services' health, performance, and behavior. Monitoring also supports troubleshooting and performance optimization. Here are examples of monitoring features you can use:

Collect metrics like latency, error rates, and resource utilization to analyze overall system performance

Perform distributed tracing to see requests' complete path and timing across multiple services

Capture service events in logs for auditing, debugging, and compliance purposes

ISTO

Istio is an opensource service mesh: 

ISTO: Simplify observability, traffic management, security, and policy with the leading service mesh.

Istio extends Kubernetes to establish a programmable, application-aware network using the powerful Envoy service proxy. Working with both Kubernetes and traditional workloads, Istio brings standard, universal traffic management, telemetry, and security to complex deployments.

Istio is an opensource service mesh that layers transparently onto existing distributed applications. Istio’s powerful features provide a uniform and more efficient way to secure, connect, and monitor services. Istio is the path to load balancing, service-to-service authentication, and monitoring – with few or no service code changes. Its powerful control plane brings vital features, including:

Secure service-to-service communication in a cluster with TLS encryption, strong identity-based authentication and authorization

Automatic load balancing for HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket, and TCP traffic

Fine-grained control of traffic behavior with rich routing rules, retries, failovers, and fault injection.

A pluggable policy layer and configuration API supporting access controls, rate limits and quotas.

Automatic metrics, logs, and traces for all traffic within a cluster, including cluster ingress and egress.

Istio is designed for extensibility and can handle a diverse range of deployment needs. Istio’s control plane runs on Kubernetes, and you can add applications deployed in that cluster to your mesh, extend the mesh to other clusters, or even connect VMs or other endpoints running outside of Kubernetes.

What is Docker:

Docker is an open-source containerization platform used for developing, deploying, and managing applications in lightweight virtualized environments called containers.