Best Service Mesh for Small Business

Streamline the process of application delivery by utilizing software-defined load balancers, web application firewalls, and container ingress services that can be deployed across any application in various data centers and cloud environments. Enhance management efficiency through unified policies and consistent operations across on-premises data centers as well as hybrid and public cloud platforms, which include VMware Cloud (such as VMC on AWS, OCVS, AVS, and GCVE), AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Empower infrastructure teams by alleviating them from manual tasks and provide DevOps teams with self-service capabilities. The automation toolkits for application delivery encompass a variety of resources, including Python SDK, RESTful APIs, and integrations with Ansible and Terraform. Additionally, achieve unparalleled insights into network performance, user experience, and security through real-time application performance monitoring, closed-loop analytics, and advanced machine learning techniques that continuously enhance system efficiency. This holistic approach not only improves performance but also fosters a culture of agility and responsiveness within the organization.

Establish, safeguard, manage, and monitor your services seamlessly. With Istio's traffic management capabilities, you can effortlessly dictate the flow of traffic and API interactions between various services. Furthermore, Istio streamlines the setup of service-level configurations such as circuit breakers, timeouts, and retries, facilitating essential processes like A/B testing, canary deployments, and staged rollouts through traffic distribution based on percentages. It also includes built-in recovery mechanisms to enhance the resilience of your application against potential failures from dependent services or network issues. The security aspect of Istio delivers a thorough solution to address these challenges, and this guide outlines how you can leverage Istio's security functionalities to protect your services across different environments. In particular, Istio security effectively addresses both internal and external risks to your data, endpoints, communications, and overall platform security. Additionally, Istio continuously generates extensive telemetry data for all service interactions within a mesh, enabling better insights and monitoring capabilities. This robust telemetry is crucial for maintaining optimal service performance and security.

Kuma provides an enterprise service mesh that seamlessly operates across multiple clouds and clusters, whether on Kubernetes or virtual machines. With just a single command, users can deploy the service mesh and automatically connect to other services through its integrated service discovery features, which include Ingress resources and remote control planes. This solution is versatile enough to function in any environment, efficiently managing resources across multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and multi-platform settings. By leveraging native mesh policies, organizations can enhance their zero-trust and GDPR compliance initiatives, thereby boosting the performance and productivity of application teams. The architecture allows for the deployment of a singular control plane that can effectively scale horizontally to accommodate numerous data planes, or to support various clusters, including hybrid service meshes that integrate both Kubernetes and virtual machines. Furthermore, cross-zone communication is made easier with Envoy-based ingress deployments across both environments, coupled with a built-in DNS resolver for optimal service-to-service interactions. Built on the robust Envoy framework, Kuma also offers over 50 observability charts right out of the box, enabling the collection of metrics, traces, and logs for all Layer 4 to Layer 7 traffic, thereby providing comprehensive insights into service performance and health. This level of observability not only enhances troubleshooting but also contributes to a more resilient and reliable service architecture.

A typical flat vL3 domain enables databases operating across various clusters, clouds, or hybrid environments to seamlessly interact for the purpose of database replication. Workloads from different organizations can connect to a unified 'collaborative' Service Mesh, facilitating interactions across companies. Each workload is restricted to a single connectivity domain, with the stipulation that only those workloads residing in the same runtime domain can participate in that connectivity. In essence, Connectivity Domains are intricately linked to Runtime Domains. However, a fundamental principle of Cloud Native architectures is to promote Loose Coupling. This characteristic allows each workload the flexibility to receive services from different providers as needed. The specific Runtime Domain in which a workload operates is irrelevant to its communication requirements. Regardless of their locations, workloads that belong to the same application need to establish connectivity among themselves, emphasizing the importance of inter-workload communication. Ultimately, this approach ensures that application performance and collaboration remain unaffected by the underlying infrastructure.

A comprehensive multi-cloud service networking solution designed to link and secure services across various runtime environments and both public and private cloud infrastructures. It offers real-time updates on the health and location of all services, ensuring progressive delivery and zero trust security with minimal overhead. Users can rest assured that all HCP connections are automatically secured, providing a strong foundation for safe operations. Moreover, it allows for detailed insights into service health and performance metrics, which can be visualized directly within the Consul UI or exported to external analytics tools. As many contemporary applications shift towards decentralized architectures rather than sticking with traditional monolithic designs, particularly in the realm of microservices, there arises a crucial need for a comprehensive topological perspective on services and their interdependencies. Additionally, organizations increasingly seek visibility into the health and performance metrics pertaining to these various services to enhance operational efficiency. This evolution in application architecture underscores the importance of robust tools that facilitate seamless service integration and monitoring.

Effortless traffic management for your service mesh. A service mesh is a robust framework that has gained traction for facilitating microservices and contemporary applications. Within this framework, the data plane, featuring service proxies such as Envoy, directs the traffic, while the control plane oversees policies, configurations, and intelligence for these proxies. Google Cloud Platform's Traffic Director acts as a fully managed traffic control system for service mesh. By utilizing Traffic Director, you can seamlessly implement global load balancing across various clusters and virtual machine instances across different regions, relieve service proxies of health checks, and set up advanced traffic control policies. Notably, Traffic Director employs open xDSv2 APIs to interact with the service proxies in the data plane, ensuring that users are not confined to a proprietary interface. This flexibility allows for easier integration and adaptability in various operational environments.

Deploy your applications seamlessly with options like containers, virtual machines, or serverless architectures, while effortlessly integrating auto-scaling, performance monitoring, and fault diagnosis features. The platform is compatible with popular frameworks such as Spring Cloud and Dubbo, as well as Service Mesh, offering comprehensive solutions that cater to various scenarios and supporting widely-used programming languages including Java, Go, PHP, Node.js, and Python. Additionally, it facilitates the cloud-native transformation of Huawei's core services, ensuring compliance with rigorous performance, usability, and security standards. A variety of development frameworks, execution environments, and essential components are provided for web, microservices, mobile, and artificial intelligence applications. It allows for complete management of applications across their lifecycle, from deployment to upgrades. The system includes robust monitoring tools, event tracking, alarm notifications, log management, and tracing diagnostics, enhanced by built-in AI functionalities that simplify operations and maintenance. Furthermore, it enables the creation of a highly customizable application delivery pipeline with just a few clicks, enhancing both efficiency and user experience. Overall, this comprehensive solution empowers developers to streamline their workflow and optimize application performance effectively.

The NGINX Service Mesh, which is always available for free, transitions effortlessly from open source projects to a robust, secure, and scalable enterprise-grade solution. With NGINX Service Mesh, you can effectively manage your Kubernetes environment, utilizing a cohesive data plane for both ingress and egress, all through a singular configuration. The standout feature of the NGINX Service Mesh is its fully integrated, high-performance data plane, designed to harness the capabilities of NGINX Plus in managing highly available and scalable containerized ecosystems. This data plane delivers unmatched enterprise-level traffic management, performance, and scalability, outshining other sidecar solutions in the market. It incorporates essential features such as seamless load balancing, reverse proxying, traffic routing, identity management, and encryption, which are crucial for deploying production-grade service meshes. Additionally, when used in conjunction with the NGINX Plus-based version of the NGINX Ingress Controller, it creates a unified data plane that simplifies management through a single configuration, enhancing both efficiency and control. Ultimately, this combination empowers organizations to achieve higher performance and reliability in their service mesh deployments.

An open-source, comprehensive microservice framework offers exceptional performance right out of the box, ensuring compatibility with widely-used ecosystems and support for multiple programming languages. It provides a service contract guarantee via OpenAPI, enabling rapid development through one-click scaffolding that accelerates the creation of microservice applications. The framework's ecological extensions accommodate various development languages, including Java, Golang, PHP, and NodeJS. Apache ServiceComb stands out as an open-source microservices solution, featuring numerous components that can be adapted to diverse scenarios through their strategic combination. This guide serves as an excellent resource for beginners looking to quickly familiarize themselves with Apache ServiceComb, making it an ideal starting point for first-time users. By decoupling programming and communication models, developers can easily integrate any necessary communication methods, allowing them to concentrate solely on APIs during the development process and seamlessly switch communication models when deploying their applications. This flexibility empowers developers to create robust microservices tailored to their specific needs.

Netmaker is an innovative open-source solution founded on the advanced WireGuard protocol. It simplifies the integration of distributed systems, making it suitable for environments ranging from multi-cloud setups to Kubernetes. By enhancing Kubernetes clusters, Netmaker offers a secure and versatile networking solution for various cross-environment applications. Leveraging WireGuard, it ensures robust modern encryption for data protection. Designed with a zero-trust architecture, it incorporates access control lists and adheres to top industry standards for secure networking practices. With Netmaker, users can establish relays, gateways, complete VPN meshes, and even implement zero-trust networks. Furthermore, the tool is highly configurable, empowering users to fully harness the capabilities of WireGuard for their networking needs. This adaptability makes Netmaker a valuable asset for organizations looking to strengthen their network security and flexibility.

Traefik Mesh is a user-friendly and easily configurable service mesh that facilitates the visibility and management of traffic flows within any Kubernetes cluster. By enhancing monitoring, logging, and visibility while also implementing access controls, it enables administrators to swiftly and effectively bolster the security of their clusters. This capability allows for the monitoring and tracing of application communications in a Kubernetes environment, which in turn empowers administrators to optimize internal communications and enhance overall application performance. The streamlined learning curve, installation process, and configuration requirements significantly reduce the time needed for implementation, allowing for quicker realization of value from the effort invested. Furthermore, this means that administrators can dedicate more attention to their core business applications. Being an open-source solution, Traefik Mesh ensures that there is no vendor lock-in, as it is designed to be opt-in, promoting flexibility and adaptability in deployments. This combination of features makes Traefik Mesh an appealing choice for organizations looking to improve their Kubernetes environments.

AWS App Mesh is a service mesh designed to enhance application-level networking, enabling seamless communication among your services across diverse computing environments. This service not only provides extensive visibility but also ensures high availability for your applications. In today's software landscape, applications typically consist of multiple services, which can be created using various compute infrastructures like Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate. As the number of services in an application increases, identifying the source of errors becomes more challenging, along with the need to reroute traffic post-errors and safely implement code updates. In the past, developers had to integrate monitoring and control mechanisms directly into their code, necessitating redeployment of services whenever changes were made. With App Mesh, these complexities are significantly reduced, allowing for a more streamlined approach to managing service interactions and updates.

Microservice practitioners on the ground soon discover that most operational issues encountered during the transition to a distributed architecture primarily stem from two key factors: networking and observability. The challenge of networking and troubleshooting a complex array of interconnected distributed services is significantly more daunting than doing so for a singular monolithic application. Envoy acts as a high-performance, self-contained server that boasts a minimal memory footprint and can seamlessly operate alongside any programming language or framework. It offers sophisticated load balancing capabilities, such as automatic retries, circuit breaking, global rate limiting, and request shadowing, in addition to zone local load balancing. Furthermore, Envoy supplies comprehensive APIs that facilitate dynamic management of its configurations, enabling users to adapt to changing needs. This flexibility and power make Envoy an invaluable asset for any microservices architecture.

Istio is an innovative open-source technology that enables developers to effortlessly connect, manage, and secure various microservices networks, irrespective of the platform, origin, or vendor. With a rapidly increasing number of contributors on GitHub, Istio stands out as one of the most prominent open-source initiatives, bolstered by a robust community. IBM takes pride in being a founding member and significant contributor to the Istio project, actively leading its Working Groups. On the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, Istio is available as a managed add-on, seamlessly integrating with your Kubernetes cluster. With just one click, users can deploy a well-optimized, production-ready instance of Istio on their IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster, which includes essential core components along with tools for tracing, monitoring, and visualization. This streamlined process ensures that all Istio components are regularly updated by IBM, which also oversees the lifecycle of the control-plane components, providing users with a hassle-free experience. As microservices continue to evolve, Istio's role in simplifying their management becomes increasingly vital.

Kiali serves as a comprehensive management console for the Istio service mesh, and it can be easily integrated as an add-on within Istio or trusted for use in a production setup. With the help of Kiali's wizards, users can effortlessly generate configurations for application and request routing. The platform allows users to perform actions such as creating, updating, and deleting Istio configurations, all facilitated by intuitive wizards. Kiali also boasts a rich array of service actions, complete with corresponding wizards to guide users. It offers both a concise list and detailed views of the components within your mesh. Moreover, Kiali presents filtered list views of all service mesh definitions, ensuring clarity and organization. Each view includes health metrics, detailed descriptions, YAML definitions, and links designed to enhance visualization of your mesh. The overview tab is the primary interface for any detail page, delivering in-depth insights, including health status and a mini-graph that illustrates current traffic related to the component. The complete set of tabs and the information available vary depending on the specific type of component, ensuring that users have access to relevant details. By utilizing Kiali, users can streamline their service mesh management and gain more control over their operational environment.

KubeSphere serves as a distributed operating system designed for managing cloud-native applications, utilizing Kubernetes as its core. Its architecture is modular, enabling the easy integration of third-party applications into its framework. KubeSphere stands out as a multi-tenant, enterprise-level, open-source platform for Kubernetes, equipped with comprehensive automated IT operations and efficient DevOps processes. The platform features a user-friendly wizard-driven web interface, which empowers businesses to enhance their Kubernetes environments with essential tools and capabilities necessary for effective enterprise strategies. Recognized as a CNCF-certified Kubernetes platform, it is entirely open-source and thrives on community contributions for ongoing enhancements. KubeSphere can be implemented on pre-existing Kubernetes clusters or Linux servers and offers options for both online and air-gapped installations. This unified platform effectively delivers a range of functionalities, including DevOps support, service mesh integration, observability, application oversight, multi-tenancy, as well as storage and network management solutions, making it a comprehensive choice for organizations looking to optimize their cloud-native operations. Furthermore, KubeSphere's flexibility allows teams to tailor their workflows to meet specific needs, fostering innovation and collaboration throughout the development process.

Manage and connect applications seamlessly across various clusters, cloud environments, and data centers. Facilitate application connectivity across diverse infrastructures using a unified management platform. Incorporate traditional workloads into your cloud-native application framework effectively. Establish tenants within your organization to implement detailed access controls and editing permissions for teams sharing the infrastructure. Keep track of the change history for services and shared resources from the very beginning. Streamline traffic management across failure domains, ensuring your customers remain unaware of any disruptions. TSB operates at the application edge, functioning at cluster ingress and between workloads in both Kubernetes and traditional computing environments. Edge and ingress gateways efficiently route and balance application traffic across multiple clusters and clouds, while the mesh framework manages service connectivity. A centralized management interface oversees connectivity, security, and visibility for your entire application network, ensuring comprehensive oversight and control. This robust system not only simplifies operations but also enhances overall application performance and reliability.

F5 Aspen Mesh enables organizations to enhance the performance of their modern application ecosystems by utilizing the capabilities of their service mesh technology. As a division of F5, Aspen Mesh is dedicated to providing high-quality, enterprise-level solutions that improve the functionality of contemporary app environments. Accelerate the development of unique and competitive features through the use of microservices, allowing for greater scalability and assurance. Minimize the likelihood of downtime while elevating the user experience for your customers. When deploying microservices into production on Kubernetes, Aspen Mesh can help you maximize the efficiency of your distributed systems. Furthermore, the platform offers alerts designed to mitigate the risks of application failures or performance issues, utilizing data and machine learning insights. Additionally, the Secure Ingress feature safely connects enterprise applications to users and the internet, ensuring robust security and accessibility for all stakeholders. By integrating these solutions, Aspen Mesh not only streamlines operations but also fosters innovation in application development.

Kuma is an open-source control plane designed for service mesh that provides essential features such as security, observability, and routing capabilities. It is built on the Envoy proxy and serves as a contemporary control plane for microservices and service mesh, compatible with both Kubernetes and virtual machines, allowing for multiple meshes within a single cluster. Its built-in architecture supports L4 and L7 policies to facilitate zero trust security, traffic reliability, observability, and routing with minimal effort. Setting up Kuma is a straightforward process that can be accomplished in just three simple steps. With Envoy proxy integrated, Kuma offers intuitive policies that enhance service connectivity, ensuring secure and observable interactions between applications, services, and even databases. This powerful tool enables the creation of modern service and application connectivity across diverse platforms, cloud environments, and architectures. Additionally, Kuma seamlessly accommodates contemporary Kubernetes setups alongside virtual machine workloads within the same cluster and provides robust multi-cloud and multi-cluster connectivity to meet the needs of the entire organization effectively. By adopting Kuma, teams can streamline their service management and improve overall operational efficiency.

In today's landscape, businesses are increasingly automating their operations by linking numerous applications through direct APIs, SaaS marketplaces, third-party tools, and hyperautomation platforms, thereby establishing a SaaS to SaaS supply chain. This interconnected supply chain facilitates the transfer of data and permissions through an ever-growing network characterized by indiscriminate and shadow connectivity, which in turn amplifies the potential risks from supply chain attacks, misconfigurations, and data leaks. To mitigate these challenges, it is essential to bring SaaS to SaaS connectivity into the open and thoroughly map the associated risk surface. Organizations should proactively identify and notify stakeholders of risky alterations, new integrations, and unusual data flows. Additionally, implementing zero trust principles across the SaaS to SaaS supply chain, along with effective governance and policy enforcement, is crucial. This approach ensures rapid, ongoing, and unobtrusive management of the SaaS to SaaS supply chain's risk surface. Furthermore, it enhances collaboration between business application teams and enterprise IT security teams, fostering a more secure and efficient operational environment. By prioritizing these measures, organizations can better protect themselves against emerging cyber threats.

Outline your cloud-native infrastructure and manage it as a systematic approach. Create a configuration for your service mesh alongside the deployment of workloads. Implement smart canary strategies and performance profiles while managing the service mesh pattern. Evaluate your service mesh setup based on deployment and operational best practices utilizing Meshery's configuration validator. Check the compliance of your service mesh with the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) standards. Enable dynamic loading and management of custom WebAssembly filters within Envoy-based service meshes. Service mesh adapters are responsible for provisioning, configuration, and management of their associated service meshes. By adhering to these guidelines, you can ensure a robust and efficient service mesh architecture.

Calisti offers robust security, observability, and traffic management solutions tailored for microservices and cloud-native applications, enabling administrators to seamlessly switch between real-time and historical data views. It facilitates the configuration of Service Level Objectives (SLOs), monitoring burn rates, error budgets, and compliance, while automatically scaling resources through GraphQL alerts based on SLO burn rates. Additionally, Calisti efficiently manages microservices deployed on both containers and virtual machines, supporting a gradual migration from VMs to containers. By applying policies uniformly, it reduces management overhead while ensuring that application Service Level Objectives are consistently met across Kubernetes and virtual machines. Furthermore, with Istio releasing updates every three months, Calisti incorporates its own Istio Operator to streamline lifecycle management, including features for canary deployments of the platform. This comprehensive approach not only enhances operational efficiency but also adapts to evolving technological advancements in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Linkerd enhances the security, observability, and reliability of your Kubernetes environment without necessitating any code modifications. It is fully Apache-licensed and boasts a rapidly expanding, engaged, and welcoming community. Constructed using Rust, Linkerd's data plane proxies are remarkably lightweight (under 10 MB) and exceptionally quick, achieving sub-millisecond latency for 99th percentile requests. There are no convoluted APIs or complex configurations to manage. In most scenarios, Linkerd operates seamlessly right from installation. The control plane of Linkerd can be deployed into a single namespace, allowing for the gradual and secure integration of services into the mesh. Additionally, it provides a robust collection of diagnostic tools, including automatic mapping of service dependencies and real-time traffic analysis. Its top-tier observability features empower you to track essential metrics such as success rates, request volumes, and latency, ensuring optimal performance for every service within your stack. With Linkerd, teams can focus on developing their applications while benefiting from enhanced operational insights.

ARMO delivers comprehensive security for both on-premises workloads and sensitive data. Utilizing our innovative technology, which is currently pending a patent, we effectively safeguard against breaches and mitigate security overhead for various environments, including cloud-native, hybrid, and legacy systems. Each microservice is uniquely defended by ARMO, achieved through the creation of a cryptographic code DNA-based identity that assesses the distinct code signature of every application, resulting in a tailored and secure identity for each workload instance. To thwart hacking attempts, we implement and uphold trusted security anchors within the protected software memory throughout the entire application execution process. Our stealth coding technology effectively hinders any reverse engineering efforts aimed at the protection code, ensuring robust security for secrets and encryption keys while they are actively in use. As a result, our encryption keys remain entirely concealed, rendering them impervious to theft and providing peace of mind to our users.

Maximize your resources. Optimize your cloud, platforms, and software. This is the new definition of application and API network operations management. All your API, application, and network operations are managed in the same place, with the same governance rules, observability and auditing. Zero-trust micro-segmentation and omni-directional traffic splitting, infrastructure agnostic authentication, and traffic management are all available to protect your resources. IT-informed decision making is possible. Massive IT operations data is generated by API, application and network monitoring and control. It is possible to access it in real-time using AI. Grey Matter makes integration easy and standardizes aggregation of all IT Operations data. You can fully leverage your mesh telemetry to secure and flexiblely future-proof your hybrid infrastructure.