As the world becomes more interconnected on a near daily basis, customer expectations are higher than ever. Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder at Kong Inc, discusses how a service mesh can help simplify microservice management.
People demand application access faster, more seamlessly and with the strongest connection possible. This is driving businesses to consequently rethink their digital experiences, inspiring a new IT generation to push against traditionally inflexible, monolithic architectures – and embrace modern APIs and microservices. We now see applications with high connectivity, distributed microservices architectures and service meshes. We’re in the Golden Age of APIs.
We covered this demand shift in a previous article, Why APIs and Microservices Are Vital for Digital TransformationOpens a new window , for which we also explored how business IT leaders are enabling this digital transformation and championing innovation. But it’s time to take it a step further. As IT teams implement APIs and microservices, there are bound to be growing pains and overall friction. This is expected when a team meets a new technology – fear and confusion of the unknown appear. But, there are API development tools, portals and testing tools to alleviate frustrations.Â
We’re focusing here on one in particular called service mesh. It’s an architecture pattern that manages all communication between microservices. In the past few years, service mesh’s popularity has catapulted. In this article, we will dig into service mesh, highlighting its positive impact and how it can simplify managing microservices to meet the surging customer expectations that organizations in all industries are facing.
The Meteoric Rise of Service Mesh
Service mesh is relatively new to the industry. It had a bumpy, confusing start. API management (APIM) was the primary technology used to implement modern API use cases. Then came 2017, and service mesh burst onto the scene, but the industry had trouble figuring out just how it fits into the space alongside APIM. Vendors didn’t adequately explain how to use service mesh most effectively. Cloud vendors like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft focused so much on the marketing that actual user adoption got lost in the shuffle. At the time, service mesh was thought of as a mysterious pattern known by everyone but used by few. Fast forward to today, and the use of service mesh is full-steam ahead in the industry.
Kong, the leading cloud connectivity company, recently released its 2022 API & Microservices Connectivity ReportOpens a new window , which underscored this service mesh boom: A majority of survey respondents (80%) have a service mesh in production or deployment, and just 1% have no plans to evaluate or deploy within the following year. Compared with 2021’s statistic seeing 20% of teams using service mesh – the demand and adoption isn’t just hype.Â
The initial introduction of service mesh was meant to help manage communication in microservice-based systems, which are broken up into loosely coupled services that “talk†over a network. A service mesh can route all inter-service communication through proxies and enable networking features like encryption and load balancing. Users gain more streamlined and straightforward communication from service-to-service in cloud applications.
See More: Why APIs and Microservices Are Vital for Digital TransformationOpens a new window
Allowing Teams to Focus on Impactful Work, Not on FunctionalityÂ
Service mesh offers the crucial capability of separating network logic from an application – or business logic of each microservice. Autonomy is the key here. It empowers IT teams to be more agile and make updates more often. Developers and IT teams can scale services individually, and one system won’t impact another, even if one fails. There won’t be any damaging domino effect.Â
In other words, the network management of any request made by any service is outsourced to an out-of-process application (the proxy). It exists outside of the service, which means it’s movable and agnostic and can support any language or framework.Â
This outsourcing is invaluable to a developer’s precious time and energy. Considering the rapid popularity of microservices, humans simply can’t keep up with managing them all. Service mesh allows developers to free up the mental capacity spent worrying about hitches in security, load balancing and logging – to focus on work that drives concrete business results.Â
Implementing Service Mesh Can Dramatically Cut IT CostsÂ
This kind of architecture’s technical advantages are clear, but let’s talk more about the business implications of how service mesh implementation can ladder up to a happy C-suite. We’ve established that service mesh makes automating a dream and smoothly guides information flow. As we mentioned, it also allows IT leaders to do away with traditional load balancers that often reduce a hop in the network. Putting that in finance-speak – shifting to service mesh could save enterprises millions of dollars, as well as save IT teams and developers a lot of time spent fixing ad-hoc issues.Â
Additionally, service mesh can also lessen the time it takes for new products to hit the market because an organization’s application team is able to focus on building what customers actually want – instead of building infrastructure. This, in turn, increases the overall application development efficiency.
As cloud-native deployments go from fantasy to fully actualized (thanks to container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes), we can expect to see more organizations embracing microservices, followed by service mesh. At the rate the industry is moving, applications are expanding dramatically and evolving in complexity, so decoupling inter-service communication from business logic will allow systems to develop faster and help breed inevitable innovation.
How do you see service mesh enabling more innovation in microservice management? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!