Comparing Service Meshes — A Comparison of Istio, Linkerd, and Consul

Cloud-native applications are architected as a constellation of distributed microservices, which are running in Containers, orchestrated through kubernetes. Adopting a microservices architecture brings a host of benefits, including increased autonomy, flexibility, and modularity. But the process of decoupling a single-tier monolithic application into smaller services introduces new obstacles: How do you know what’s running? How do you roll out new versions of your services? How do you secure and monitor all those containers?

Most companies using microservices architecture don’t fully understand until they are well down the path about microservices sprawl. The number of small services, that are deployed expand exponentially & this exponential growth in microservices creates challenges around figuring out how to enforce and standardize things like routing between multiple services/versions, authentication and authorization, encryption, and load balancing within a Kubernetes cluster. Building on Service Mesh helps resolve some of these issues, and more

As containers abstract away the operating system from the application, Service Meshes abstract away how inter-process communications are handled.

What is Service Mesh

Proliferation of microservices that are built on Kubernetes has contributed to the growing interest in Service Mesh solutions. Microservices are heavily reliant on the network.

Service Mesh manages the network traffic between services. It does that in a much more graceful and scalable way compared to what would otherwise require a lot of manual, error-prone work and operational burden that is not sustainable in the long-run.

Service mesh allows you to separate the business logic of the application from observability, and network and security policies. It allows you to connect, secure, and monitor your microservices.

Connect: Service Mesh enables services to discover and talk to each other. It enables intelligent routing to control the flow of traffic and API calls between services/endpoints. These also enable advanced deployment strategies such as blue/green, canaries or rolling upgrades, and more.

Secure: Service Mesh allows you secure communication between services. It can enforce policies to allow or deny communication.

Monitor: Service Mesh enables observability of your distributed microservices system. Service Mesh often integrates out-of-the-box with monitoring and tracing tools (such as Prometheus and Jaeger in the case of Kubernetes) to allow you to discover and visualize dependencies between services, traffic flow, API latencies, and tracing.

Comparison of Istio, Linkerd and Consul Connect

Any of these service meshes will solve your basic needs. The choice comes down to whether you want more than the basics.

Istio has the most features and flexibility of any of these three service meshes by far, but remember that flexibility means complexity, so your team needs to be ready for that.

For a minimalistic approach supporting just Kubernetes, Linkerd may be the best choice. If you want to support a heterogeneous environment that includes both Kubernetes and VMs and do not need the complexity of Istio, then Consul would probably be your best bet.

Anthos Service Mesh

Anthos Service Mesh is Google’s implementation of the powerful Istio open-source project, allowing you to manage, observe, and secure your services without having to change your application code.

Fully managed, full stop

Since it’s a fully managed offering, Anthos Service Mesh takes all the guesswork and effort out of procuring and managing your service mesh solution. You focus on developing great apps.

Understand your apps

Anthos Service Mesh’s robust tracing, monitoring, and logging features give you deep insights into how your services are performing, how that performance affects other processes, and any issues that might exist.

Security simplified

Anthos Service Mesh helps you embrace a zero-trust security model by giving you the tools to automatically and declaratively secure your services and their communication. You can manage authentication, authorization, and encryption between services with a diverse set of features — all with little or no changes to the applications themselves.

Easy traffic management

With Anthos Service Mesh, you can control traffic flows and API calls between services while also gaining visibility into your traffic. This makes calls more reliable and your network more robust, even in adverse conditions.

With Anthos Service Mesh, you get an Anthos tested and supported distribution of Istio, letting you create and deploy a service mesh on GKE on Google Cloud and other platforms with full Google support.