What and Why Service Mesh
What is Service Mesh (What a boring word. huh?)
We have looked into the K8s structure last time, why the application is better to be managed by each of mircroservices. But did you also think about how this microservices-based Pod communicate with each other?
In a traditional microservices setup without a service mesh, these services need to communicate with each other for the application to function.
Without a service mesh, you might get in trouble making the pod communicate with each other, in the area of service discovery, load balancing, security, and monitoring.
Let’s make it into more like simple way.
Imagine that you’re in a Bar with your friends.
- Without a Service Mesh (No Bar Manager) :
- You need to go through the bar, try to look for the bartender, kitchen, and cashier on your own.
- The bartender needs to take all drink orders and payments directly.
- The kitchen has to rely on the bartender to get food orders.
2. With a Service Mesh (Bar with Manager) :
- The manager ensures there’s a clear system for customers to place drink and food orders and make payments.
- The manager helps balance the load by directing customers to different areas (service instances).
- Security is managed by the manager, ensuring that customers pay the right amount and receive the correct orders.
- The manager monitors the performance of the bartender and kitchen, making sure everything runs smoothly.
Simply,
Service Mesh will help you to make microservices to talk with each other easily. It manages the flow of work among microservices, preventing overload or confusion. And also, it will allow you to control testing and release of new features without affecting the entire system.
The last thing. Service Mesh watches over the microservices, making sure they’re healthy and fixing issues if something goes wrong.
Industry Giants like Datadog and New relic are providing the monitoring platform for users to easily tracking the network alongside this service mesh.
Istio Only?
Nope,
there are plenty of alternatives to Istio. One such option is Linkerd. This has achieved Graduated Maturity in CNCF - even though Istio has been leading in usage so far, Linkerd is gaining popularity, and it’s an official project of CNCF.
Will Talk about Linkered later,
Presently, my understanding of Linkerd is limited, but I’m excited about the prospect of immersing myself in this project after attending KubeCon 2024. I expect an in-depth exploration, intending to gather insights and details that I can share in more depth on my tech blog.
Looking forward to uncovering the nuances, functionalities, and unique aspects of Linkerd — and of course any other technical trends 2024 — so I can contribute valuable information to the public through my blog posts.
02.10.2024 — Fin.
