Docker Rosenheim Meetup – What is a Service Mesh?
Last week we had another great Docker Rosenheim Meetup at white duck. We had about 25 attendees, lots of pizza and even more fun.
In this article, we would like to summarize our Meetup as well as provide some details for all of you who weren’t able to join us. If you are not yet part of our Meetup community don’t miss to join to never miss our Meetups again. Also don’t miss to follow us on Twitter.
So, what exactly is a Service Mesh?
A Service Mesh is a fleet of managed proxies that support microservices with their service-to-service, ingress and egress communication in a fast, reliable, secure manner.
Before we start with what a Service Mesh in detail is I would like to shortly talk about when we think a Service Mesh could be helpful for your project:
- microservice-based architecture
- primary Kubernetes-based workload
- many synchronous service-to-service communications
- unsolved issues related to monitoring, routing, resilience and security
If one or more of the above bullet points apply to your project you should at least think about whether a Service Mesh would bring some benefits to you.
A Service Mesh can provide you with lots of benefits. It helps you to increases resilience by providing you abstraction with
- encryption, policies, authentication
- circuit breaking, timeout and retry management
- application metrics monitoring
A Service Mesh can also help you with advanced traffic routing like
- A/B testing
- Canary Releases
- Blue/Green Deployments
With this in place, a service mesh can support you focus on your business logic instead of dealing with micro-service difficulties.
Don’t miss our slides which contain further details about Service Meshes as well as a deep dive into Istio. The slides are available here.
You can also review Servicemesh.es which provides you with further details on the available Service Meshes as well as their pros and cons.
All of our sample code is available here.
Some impressions
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