The SMI is a specification standard for portable APIs for interoperability between service mesh providers. Brendan Burns proposed the SMI in May 2019 for a common standard along the lines of CNI, CSI, and OCI, which are the abstraction interface standards for network, storage, and containers for Kubernetes.
As service meshes continue to gain momentum in order to provide an infrastructure layer on top of modern cloud-native applications, the need for a SMI specification is arising. Gabe Monroy announced the launch of the SMI in May 2019 with the launch of an open source project (https://smi-spec.io/) in collaboration with Istio, Linkerd, and Consul.
SMI intends to support tooling through an abstraction layer for frameworks such as Weavework's Flagger (https://github.com/weaveworks/flagger) and Rancher Labs' Rio (https://rio.io and https://github.com/rancher/rio...