Service Mesh Wars, Goodbye Istio
Service Mesh Wars, Goodbye Istio - Eric Fossas - Medium
After using Istio in production for almost 2 years, we’re saying goodbye to it. Learn why, as well as the current state of the Service Mesh Wars.The Service Mesh Wars are raging. My vote goes to Linkerd, for now.Let’s get some of the basics out of the way.Why use a service mesh?It provides traffic monitoring between your micro-services, including a map of service communication and http status codes occurring between them.Adding a service mesh enables you to add mTLS, or in other words, encrypted http traffic between your services.That’s it, in my opinion. Those two tools are very useful to almost everybody.A lot of service meshes offer advanced features like traffic splitting, retries, timeouts, etc. I rarely believe these are useful or I think it’s a feature that shouldn’t be handled by a sidecar proxy. They’re often used incorrectly to try and solve a problem that should be fixed some other way.Is it hard to use a service mesh?Yes. If you use any service mesh, you’ll learn a few things the hard way:service meshes only reliably support http traffic right now