The goal of a service mesh is to provide service to service communication along with some higher level features like observability, policy enforcement, retries, back off and security. Most service meshes have two components: a control plane and a data plane. The control plane is responsible for making decisions about where to send the traffic and to configure the data plane. The data plane provides the ability to forward requests from the applications.

In this presentation, we will take a look at the history of how the term “Service Mesh” came about. We will describe what it takes to create a service mesh control plane and a data plane. We will explore the responsibilities of each of those components and why they are critical to the overall functioning of a service mesh. We will conclude with a real-world example of a service mesh in action that connects services running in VMs and containers securely.

Speaker bio

Anubhav Mishra is technical advisor to the CTO at HashiCorp. Previously, he worked at Hootsuite, where he created Atlantis - An Open Source project that helps teams collaborate on Infrastructure using Terraform. Anubhav loves working with distributed systems and sharing his experience with microservice delivery platforms. He also loves open source software and is continuously finding ways to contribute to projects that excite him and helping developers and operators do better. That has led him to contribute to projects like Virtual Kubelet and Helm (CNCF projects). In his free time, he DJs, makes music and plays football. He’s a huge Manchester United supporter.

Service mesh: beyond hype