If you’re struggling to manage microservices as architectures continue to scale, there’s a good chance you’ve at least heard of service mesh. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll assume you’re familiar with the basic tenets of a service mesh.
I believe that service mesh is advancing microservice communication to a new level that is unachievable with the one-off solutions that were previously being used. DNS patterns, configuration management and other technologies provide some capabilities such as service discovery, but they don’t provide fast retries, load balancing, tracing and health monitoring. The old approach also requires that you cobble together several things each time rather than bundle everything into a reusable tool.
While it’s possible to accomplish much of what a service mesh manages with individual tools and processes, the process is a pain in the ass. The image below provides a good idea of how a mesh simplifies the management of microservices.
Right Around the Corner
So what’s in the immediate future? I think we’ll see the technology quickly mature and add more capabilities as standard features in response to enterprises realizing the efficiency gains created by a mesh and look to implement them as the standard for managing microservice architectures. Service mesh is likely immature for production deployments, but the road map is progressing quickly and it seems we’ll be to v1 in short order. Security is a feature provided by service mesh, but for most enterprises it’s a major consideration and I see policy enforcement and monitoring options becoming more robust for enterprise production deployments.
A feature I see on the near horizon—and one that will provide tremendous value—is an analytics dashboard to show insights from the huge amount of telemetry data in a service mesh. I think an emerging value proposition we’ll see is that the mesh allows you to gain and act on data that will allow you to more efficiently manage your entire architecture.
Further Down the Road
There is a lot of discussion on what’s on the immediate horizon for service mesh, but what is more interesting is considering what the long term will bring. My guess is that we ultimately come to a mesh being an embedded value-add in a platform. Microservices are clearly the way of the future, so organizations are going to demand an effortless way to manage them. They’ll want something automated, running in the background that never has to be thought about. This is probably years down the road, but I do believe service mesh will eventually be a ubiquitous technology that is a fully managed plug and play config. It will be interesting to see new ways of using the technology to manage infrastructure, services and applications.
We’re excited to be part of the journey, and are inspired by how users are leveraging service mesh to solve direct problems created by the explosion of microservices and also find new efficiencies with it. I look forward to seeing what the community comes up with that I have not yet even imagined.
