Best Service Mesh for Kubernetes

Connect, secure, control, and observe services. Istio’s traffic routing rules let you easily control the flow of traffic and API calls between services. Istio simplifies configuration of service-level properties like circuit breakers, timeouts, and retries, and makes it easy to set up important tasks like A/B testing, canary rollouts, and staged rollouts with percentage-based traffic splits. It also provides out-of-box failure recovery features that help make your application more robust against failures of dependent services or the network. Istio Security provides a comprehensive security solution to solve these issues. This page gives an overview on how you can use Istio security features to secure your services, wherever you run them. In particular, Istio security mitigates both insider and external threats against your data, endpoints, communication, and platform. Istio generates detailed telemetry for all service communications within a mesh.

The always-free NGINX Service Mesh scales from open source projects to a fully supported, secure, and scalable enterprise‑grade solution. Take control of Kubernetes with NGINX Service Mesh, featuring a unified data plane for ingress and egress management in a single configuration. The real star of NGINX Service Mesh is the fully integrated, high-performance data plane. Leveraging the power of NGINX Plus to operate highly available and scalable containerized environments, our data plane brings a level of enterprise traffic management, performance, and scalability to the market that no other sidecars can offer. It provides the seamless and transparent load balancing, reverse proxy, traffic routing, identity, and encryption features needed for production-grade service mesh deployments. When paired with the NGINX Plus-based version of NGINX Ingress Controller, it provides a unified data plane that can be managed with a single configuration.

Today's Kubernetes environments need help in scaling, securing and observing modern cloud-native applications. Gloo Mesh, based on the industry's leading Istio service mesh, simplifies multi-cloud and multi-cluster management of service mesh for containers and virtual machines. Gloo Mesh helps platform engineering teams to reduce costs, reduce risks, and improve application agility. Gloo Mesh is a modular component of Gloo Platform. The service mesh allows for application-aware network tasks to be managed independently from the application, adding observability, security, and reliability to distributed applications. By introducing the service mesh to your applications, you can: Simplify the application layer Provide more insights into your traffic Increase the security of your application

Enterprise service mesh based on Kuma for multi-cloud and multi-cluster on both Kubernetes and VMs. Deploy with a single command. Connect to other services automatically with built-in service discovery, including an Ingress resource and remote CPs. Support across any environment, including multi-cluster, multi-cloud and multi-platform on both Kubernetes and VMs. Accelerate initiatives like zero-trust and GDPR with native mesh policies, improving the speed and efficiency of every application team. Deploy a single control plane that can scale horizontally to many data planes, or support multiple clusters or even hybrid service meshes running on both Kubernetes and VMs combined. Simplify cross-zone communication using an Envoy-based ingress deployment on both Kubernetes and VMs, as well as the built-in DNS resolver for service-to-service communication. Built on top of Envoy with 50+ observability charts out of the box, you can collect metrics, traces, and logs of all L4-L7 traffic.

A common flat vL3 domain allowing DBs running in multiple clusters/clouds/hybrid to communicate just with each other for DB replication. Workloads from multiple companies connecting to a single ‘collaborative’ Service Mesh for cross company interactions. Each workload has a single option of what connectivity domain to be connected to, and only workloads in a given runtime domain could be part of its connectivity domain. In short: Connectivity Domains are Strongly Coupled to Runtime Domains. A central tenant of Cloud Native is Loose Coupling. In a Loosely Coupled system, the ability for each workload to receive service from alternative providers is preserved. What Runtime Domain a workload is running in is a non-sequitur to its communications needs. Workloads that are part of the same App need Connectivity between each other no matter where they are running.

AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to facilitate communication between your services across various types of computing infrastructure. App Mesh offers comprehensive visibility and high availability for your applications. Modern applications are generally made up of multiple services. Each service can be developed using various types of compute infrastructure, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate. As the number of services within an application grows, it becomes difficult to pinpoint the exact location of errors, redirect traffic after errors, and safely implement code changes. Previously, this required creating monitoring and control logic directly in your code and redeploying your services every time there were changes.

F5 Aspen Mesh empowers companies to drive more performance from their modern app environment by leveraging the power of their service mesh. As part of F5, Aspen Mesh is focused on delivering enterprise-class products that enhance companies’ modern app environments. Deliver new and differentiating features faster with microservices. Aspen Mesh lets you do that at scale, with confidence. Reduce the risk of downtime and improve your customers’ experience. If you’re scaling microservices to production on Kubernetes, Aspen Mesh will help you get the most out of your distributed systems. Aspen Mesh empowers companies to drive more performance from their modern app environment by leveraging the power of their service mesh. Alerts that decrease the risk of application failure or performance degradation based on data and machine learning models. Secure Ingress safely exposes enterprise apps to customers and the web.

Netmaker is an open source tool based on the groundbreaking WireGuard protocol. Netmaker unifies distributed environments with ease, from multi-cloud to Kubernetes. Netmaker enhances Kubernetes clusters by providing flexible and secure networking for cross-environment scenarios. Netmaker uses WireGuard for modern, secure encryption. It is built with zero trust in mind, utilizes access control lists, and follows leading industry standards for secure networking. Netmaker enables you to create relays, gateways, full VPN meshes, and even zero trust networks. Netmaker is fully configurable to let you maximize the power of Wireguard.

Traefik Mesh is a straight-forward, easy to configure, and non-invasive service mesh that allows visibility and management of the traffic flows inside any Kubernetes cluster. By improving monitoring, logging, and visibility, as well as implementing access controls. Allows administrators to increase the security of their clusters easily and quickly. By being able to monitor and trace how applications communicate in your Kubernetes cluster, administrators are able to optimize internal communications, and improve application performance. Reducing the time to learn, install, and configure makes it easier to implement, and to provide value for the time actually spent implementing. Administrators can focus on their business applications. Being open source means that there is no vendor lock-in, as Traefik Mesh is opt-in by design.

Calisti enables security, observability, traffic management for microservices and cloud native applications, and allows admins to switch between live and historical views. Configuring Service Level Objectives (SLOs), burn rate, error budget and compliance monitoring, Calisti sends a GraphQL alert to automatically scale based on SLO burn rate. Calisti manages microservices running on containers and virtual machines, allowing for application migration from VMs to containers in a phased manner. Reducing management overhead by applying policies consistently and meeting application Service Level Objectives across both K8s and VMs. Istio has new releases every three months. Calisti includes our Istio Operator that automates lifecycle management, and even enables canary deployment of the platform itself.

ARMO provides total security for in-house workloads and data. Our patent-pending technology prevents breaches and protects against security overhead regardless of your environment, cloud-native, hybrid, or legacy. ARMO protects every microservice and protects it uniquely. We do this by creating a cryptographic code DNA-based workload identity, analyzing each application’s unique code signature, to deliver an individualized and secure identity to every workload instance. To prevent hacking, we establish and maintain trusted security anchors in the protected software memory throughout the application execution lifecycle. Stealth coding-based technology blocks all attempts at reverse engineering of the protection code and ensures comprehensive protection of secrets and encryption keys while in-use. Our keys are never exposed and thus cannot be stolen.

KubeSphere is a distributed operating system for cloud-native application management, using Kubernetes as its kernel. It provides a plug-and-play architecture, allowing third-party applications to be seamlessly integrated into its ecosystem. KubeSphere is also a multi-tenant enterprise-grade open-source Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated IT operations and streamlined DevOps workflows. It provides developer-friendly wizard web UI, helping enterprises to build out a more robust and feature-rich Kubernetes platform, which includes the most common functionalities needed for enterprise Kubernetes strategies. A CNCF-certified Kubernetes platform, 100% open-source, built and improved by the community. Can be deployed on an existing Kubernetes cluster or Linux machines, supports the online and air-gapped installation. Deliver DevOps, service mesh, observability, application management, multi-tenancy, storage, and networking management in a unified platform.

Connect and manage applications across clusters, clouds, and data centers. Coordinate app connectivity across heterogeneous infrastructure from a single management plane. Integrate traditional workloads into your cloud-native application infrastructure. Create tenants within your business to define fine-grained access control and editing rights for teams on shared infrastructure. Audit the history of changes to services and shared resources from day zero. Automate traffic shifting across failure domains before your customers notice. TSB sits at the application edge, at cluster ingress, and between workloads in your Kubernetes and traditional compute clusters. Edge and ingress gateways route and load balance application traffic across clusters and clouds while the mesh controls connectivity between services. A single management plane configures connectivity, security, and observability for your entire application network.

Fully managed Linkerd, right on your cluster. Running a service mesh shouldn’t require a team of engineers. Buoyant Cloud manages Linkerd so that you don’t have to. Automate away the toil. Buoyant Cloud automatically keeps your Linkerd control plane and data plane up to date with the latest versions and handles installs, trust anchor rotation, and more. Automate upgrades, installs, and more. Keep data plane proxy versions always in sync. Rotate TLS trust anchors without breaking a sweat. Never get taken unaware. Buoyant Cloud continuously monitors the health of your Linkerd deployments and proactively alerts you of potential issues before they escalate. Automatically track service mesh health. Get a global, cross-cluster view of Linkerd's behavior. Monitor and report Linkerd best practices. Forget overly-complicated solutions that pile one layer of complexity on top of another. Linkerd just works, and Buoyant Cloud makes Linkerd easier than ever.¿

The open-source control plane for service mesh, delivering security, observability, routing and more. Built on top of Envoy, Kuma is a modern control plane for Microservices & Service Mesh for both K8s and VMs, with support for multiple meshes in one cluster. Out of the box L4 + L7 policy architecture to enable zero trust security, observability, discovery, routing and traffic reliability in one click. Getting up and running with Kuma only requires three easy steps. Natively embedded with Envoy proxy, Kuma Delivers easy to use policies that can secure, observe, connect, route and enhance service connectivity for every application and services, databases included. Build modern service and application connectivity across every platform, cloud and architecture. Kuma supports modern Kubernetes environments and Virtual Machine workloads in the same cluster, with native multi-cloud and multi-cluster connectivity to support the entire organization.

Describe all of your cloud native infrastructure and manage as a pattern. Design your service mesh configuration and workload deployments. Apply intelligent canary strategies and performance profiles with service mesh pattern management. Assess your service mesh configuration against deployment and operational best practices with Meshery's configuration validator. Validate your service mesh's conformance to Service Mesh Interface (SMI) specifications. Dynamically load and manage your own WebAssembly filters in Envoy-based service meshes. Service mesh adapters provision, configure, and manage their respective service meshes.

The documentation set for this product strives to use bias-free language. For the purposes of this documentation set, bias-free is defined as language that does not imply discrimination based on age, disability, gender, racial identity, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and intersectionality. Exceptions may be present in the documentation due to language that is hardcoded in the user interfaces of the product software, language used based on RFP documentation, or language that is used by a referenced third-party product. Learn more about how Cisco is using Inclusive Language. With the accelerating demand for digital transformation, businesses are increasingly adopting cloud-native architectures. Microservice-based applications are created with software functionality spread across multiple services that are independently deployable, easier to maintain and test, and can be more rapidly updated.

Linkerd adds critical security, observability, and reliability features to your Kubernetes stack—no code change required. Linkerd is 100% Apache-licensed, with an incredibly fast-growing, active, and friendly community. Built in Rust, Linkerd's data plane proxies are incredibly small (<10 mb) and blazing fast (p99 < 1ms). No complex APIs or configuration. For most applications, Linkerd will “just work” out of the box. Linkerd's control plane installs into a single namespace, and services can be safely added to the mesh, one at a time. Get a comprehensive suite of diagnostic tools, including automatic service dependency maps and live traffic samples. Best-in-class observability allows you to monitor golden metrics—success rate, request volume, and latency—for every service.