The Enterprise Path to Service Mesh Architectures

Preface

As someone interested in modern software design, you have heard of service mesh architectures primarily in the context of microservices. Service meshes introduce a new layer into modern infrastructures, offering the potential for creating and running robust and scalable applications while exercising granular control over them. Is a service mesh right for you? This report will help answer common questions on service mesh architectures through the lens of a large enterprise. It also addresses how to evaluate your organization’s readiness, provides factors to consider when building new applications and converting existing applications to best take advantage of a service mesh, and offers insight on deployment architectures used to get you there.

What You Will Learn

• What is a service mesh and why do I need one?

  • What are the different service meshes, and how do they contrast?

• Where do services meshes layer in with other technologies?

• When and why should I adopt a service mesh?

  • What are popular deployment models and why?

  • What are practical steps to adopt a service mesh in my enterprise?

  • How do I fit a service mesh into my existing infrastructure?

Who This Report Is For

The intended readers are developers, operators, architects, and infrastructure (IT) leaders, who are faced with operational challenges of distributed systems. Technologists need to understand the various capabilities of and paths to service meshes so that they can better face the decision of selecting and investing in an architecture and deployment model to provide visibility, resiliency, traffic, and security control of their distributed application services.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Dr. Girish Ranganathan (Dr. G) and the occasional two “t”s Matt Baldwin for their many efforts to ensure the technical correctness of this report.