From the latest CNCF annual survey, it is pretty clear that a lot of people are showing high interest in service mesh in their project and many are already using in Production. Nearly 69% are evaluating Istio, and 64% are evaluating Linkerd. By infracloud.io.
Source: @infracloud.io https://www.infracloud.io/service-mesh-comparison-istio-vs-linkerd/
Over the past few years, Microservices architecture has become a more popular style in designing software applications. In this architecture, we breakdown the application into independently deployable services. The services are usually lightweight, polyglot in nature, and often managed by various functional teams. This architecture style works well until a certain point when the number of these services becomes higher, difficult to manage and they are not simple anymore. This leads to challenges in managing various aspects like security, network traffic control, and observability. A service mesh helps address these challenges.
The article then pays attention to:
- Introduction to Service Mesh
- Istio
- Architecture
- Components
- Linkerd
- Architecture
- Control plane
- Data plane
- Comparison: Istio vs Linkerd
Service meshes are becoming an essential building block in the cloud-native solutions and in the microservice architecture. It allows you to do all heavy lifting jobs like traffic management, resiliency and observability and relieve developers to focus on the business logic. Istio and Linkerd, both are mature and are being used in production by various enterprises. Planning and analysis of your requirements are essential in picking up which service mesh to use. Please spend sufficient time during the analysis phase because it is complex to move from one to another later in the game.
Loads of charts to describe architecture and main components of both meshes and plenty foi links to further reading. Excellent read!
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