Good article - I must admit I’m vaguely familiar with the concept and this read certainly gave me some new insights.
One meta call out on the writing - I read and scrolled at least 30% through the page on my iPhone until the author explained why I should care about a service mesh I.e. what problems it tries to simplify or solve.
It seems to me there are some strong use cases here, but it’s only worth your while if you’re operating at sufficient scale.
For instance, if my team at some FAANG scale company is responsible for vending the library that provides TLS or log rotation or <insert cross cutting/common use case here>, and it requires some non trivial on boarding and operational cost, migrating to this kind of architecture longer term where these concerns are handled out of the box may be beneficial.
Still - it doesn’t mean the service owners are off the hook. They still need to tune their retry logic, or confirm the proxy is configured to call the correct endpoints (let say my service is a client of another service B and for us, B has a dedicated fleet because of our traffic patterns). This is an abstraction. Abstractions have cost.
Trust but verify.
The trap people fall into is, “Here’s a new technology or concept. Let’s all flock to it without considering the costs.”
One meta call out on the writing - I read and scrolled at least 30% through the page on my iPhone until the author explained why I should care about a service mesh I.e. what problems it tries to simplify or solve.
It seems to me there are some strong use cases here, but it’s only worth your while if you’re operating at sufficient scale.
For instance, if my team at some FAANG scale company is responsible for vending the library that provides TLS or log rotation or <insert cross cutting/common use case here>, and it requires some non trivial on boarding and operational cost, migrating to this kind of architecture longer term where these concerns are handled out of the box may be beneficial.
Still - it doesn’t mean the service owners are off the hook. They still need to tune their retry logic, or confirm the proxy is configured to call the correct endpoints (let say my service is a client of another service B and for us, B has a dedicated fleet because of our traffic patterns). This is an abstraction. Abstractions have cost.
Trust but verify.
The trap people fall into is, “Here’s a new technology or concept. Let’s all flock to it without considering the costs.”