Service Mesh
Service mesh functionality has been one of the largest additions/extensions to Kubernetes in its short history. There's a lot of debate around the additional complexity of using a service mesh and whether all the features are even required.
For the purposes of this book, we're going to focus on the service mesh provided out of the box within OpenShift, which is based on the open-source Istio project. There are other implementations, such as Linkerd, SuperGloo, and Traefik, out there that are excellent and offer similar functionality to Istio.
The OpenShift service mesh provides the following features out of the box:
- Security: Authentication and authorization, mutual TLS (encryption), policies
- Traffic management: Resiliency features, virtual services, policies, fault injection
- Observability: Service metrics, call tracing, access logs
Why Service Mesh?
We previously talked about resiliency and how patterns like circuit breakers can...