Choosing a service mesh

The service mesh concept is relatively new, but there are already many choices out there. We will be using Istio later in the chapter. However, you may prefer a different service mesh for your use case. Here is a concise review of the current cohort of service meshes.

Envoy

Envoy (https://www.envoyproxy.io) is yet another CNCF graduated project. It is a very versatile and high-performance L7 proxy. It provides many service mesh capabilities; however, it is considered pretty low-level and difficult to configure. It is also not Kubernetes-specific. Some of the Kubernetes service meshes use Envoy as the underlying data plane and provide a Kubernetes-native control plane to configure and interact with it. If you want to use Envoy directly on Kubernetes, then the recommendation is to use other open source projects like Ambassador and Gloo as an ingress controller and/or API gateway.

Linkerd 2

Linkerd 2 (https://linkerd.io) is a Kubernetes-specific...