Despite relatively low chatter, service mesh businesses are booming as adoption expands. In October 2021, service mesh vendor Solo.io earned unicorn status after a $135 million Series C investment resulted in a $1 billion-plus valuation.
The funding has come after 500% quarter-over-quarter growth for Solo.io, who also offers a proxy-based API gateway called Gloo Edge in addition to Gloo Mesh. The unbelievable growth comes from a logical direction—the rising popularity of microservices and container-based applications powered by companies modernizing applications. One of Solo.io’s main competitors, Kong, another freshly-crowned unicorn, also received a $100 million Series D investment earlier this year.
Service mesh is emerging as the top tool to tackle multicloud security
What are Service Mesh Tools?
Service mesh tools are used to add monitoring and security functionality to cloud-native applications. A service mesh is implemented at the platform layer rather than the application layer and uses network proxies to facilitate communication between microservices. With the incredibly complex nature of modern cloud-native, microservices-based applications, service mesh provides flexible end-to-end protection.Gartner claims only 5% of enterprises have a service mesh in production, and places the technology as approaching the “trough of disillusionment” in 2021’s Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking. But I’d argue, recent funding in the market indicates an uptick in the service mesh market, indicating a move past the disillusionment of service mesh’s complexity.
So, why now?
Service mesh tools provide a need for blanket, segmented security controls across complex hybrid computing environments and disparate cloud services. Enterprise adoption was slowed by the innovative technology’s novelty and initial perception of complexity, but this intimidation appears to be waning with experience.
What is a service mesh and who needs one?
Service mesh tools emerged out of a need to unify security controls and observability when working with container-based applications and microservices in complex multicloud environments. These applications and environments consist of numerous, ever-evolving components and services with huge security implications.
Service mesh tools make it much easier to implement and enforce security and compliance policies across microservices, containers, and virtual machines. The service mesh works on two separate planes, control and data. The control level facilitates actions and behaviors of network proxies while the data plane monitors communication between cloud services. Administrators then use APIs to change the service mesh policies or retrieve data gathered by the tool.
Service mesh tools provide three main benefits:
- Security is the main benefit and core function of a service mesh. Complex infrastructure and cloud services require advanced security features to simplify certificate management. Service mesh tools provide automated encryption and authentication features to standardize certification across services. By integrating with orchestration systems, the service mesh automatically identifies what actions are being requested, authenticates each party, and enforces specified policies.
- Visibility features collect information about how cloud services interact and behave. Information gathered by service mesh tools can aid in diagnosing communication errors, optimize service-to-service communication, and improve performance by identifying latency and other slowing factors.
- Stability is provided when issues are identified and diagnosed. Unified observability helps point out inefficiencies in applications or services and optimize their numerous, interoperating components and services for peak performance. Smart routing helps as well by providing topology-aware routing and integrating with orchestration systems for IP resolution.
“AWS App Mesh is a managed, reliable, secure, and highly available service. It allows you to manage service communications without needing to install or manage application-level infrastructure for communications management. Also, AWS App Mesh services give end-to-end visibility and helping to ensure high availability for your application,” - AWS App Mesh Review
Service mesh usage will expand, but not without growing pains
The biggest benefit of a service mesh’s security, observability, and optimization features is that developers can spend less time configuring policies and more time adding business value. It’s a logical marriage of microservices and security, but there’s still much room for improvement.
The biggest holdup for enterprise adoption, aside from platform agnosticism, is the ability for service mesh to efficiently tackle securing multicluster environments. Service mesh is great for simplifying visibility and control of interservice communication and individual clusters but can add complexity if implemented without experience.
If implemented correctly, the service mesh becomes a centralized dashboard for monitoring and managing everything within a microservices architecture. If done incorrectly, the inherent flexibility and customizability can be overwhelming and counterproductive.
Some tools will have to expand past operating solely on Kubernetes to support complex enterprise environments and support a larger variety of virtual machines and on-premises workloads. But as professionals gain experience implementing the technology in complex multicloud, enterprise environments, service mesh’s adoption will continue to grow along with the market as a whole.
Want to learn more about service mesh options? Check out the top Service Mesh Tools on G2:
Edited by Sinchana Mistry
Want to learn more about Container Orchestration Tools? Explore Container Orchestration products.
Aaron Walker
Aaron has been researching security, cloud, and emerging technologies with G2 for more than half a decade. Over that time he's outlined, defined, and maintained a large portion of G2's taxonomy related to cybersecurity, infrastructure, development, and IT management markets. Aaron utilizes his relationships with vendors, subject-matter expertise, and familiarity with G2 data to help buyers and businesses better understand emerging challenges, solutions, and technologies. In his free time, Aaron enjoys photography, design, Chicago sports and lizards.
