Service Mesh Is Still Hard from buzai232's blog

At ServiceMeshCon EU this August, William Morgan from Linkerd and I gave a joint talk entitled service mesh is still hard. William detailed the improvements to Linkerd, while I covered the improvements to Istio. It’s clear both projects are working hard to make it easier for users to adopt service mesh.To get more news about hard mesh, you can visit boegger.net official website.

Service mesh is more mature than it was one or two years ago, however, it’s still hard for users. There are two types of technical roles for service mesh, platform owners and service owners. Platform owners, also called mesh admins, own the service platform and define the overall strategy and implementation for service owners to adopt service mesh. Service owners own one or more services in the mesh.

It’s become easier for platform owners to use service meshes because the projects are implementing ways to ease the configuration of the network, configuration of security policies, and visualization of the entire mesh. For example, within Istio, platform owners can set Istio authentication policies or authorization policies at whichever scope they prefer. Platform owners can configure the ingress gateway on hosts/ports/TLS related settings while delegating the actual routing behaviors and traffic policies of the destination service to service owners. Service owners implementing well tested and common scenarios are benefitting from usability improvement in Istio to easily onboard their microservices to the mesh. Service owners implementing less common scenarios continue to encounter a steep learning curve.
Adding to the complexity, the answer may be different for the various service mesh projects. Even within Istio, we adopted microservices to fully leverage the mesh in earlier releases prior to Istio 1.5, but decided to turn multiple Istio control plane components into a monolithic application to reduce the operational complexity. For that instance, it made more sense to run one monolithic service instead of four or five microservices.